Binary
by Punctuator
Summary: Semi-A/U, and a what-if: one captain, one ship, and one big crew, all out to reignite the sun. Action and horror, tragedy and heroics, and, of course, set-pieces as big as all outdoors. Welcome to the one and only mission of Project Icarus.
1. Chapter 1

**BINARY**

_We're the night shift, man. No one gives a damn._

Following ten minutes of nothing but breathing and low-level hiss from the suit-feeds, Harvey's voice crackled from the speaker above Loinnir Whitby's head. She glanced up from her navigational stats report. Harvey sounded nervous. No surprise there. Next to Robert Capa, no one hated suit-time more than their second comms officer. Whitby took a conscious look at the chronometer. Yes: ten minutes had passed since the last verbal signal from the feeds. She remembered, now, Mace logging his and Harvey's move to sector eight on the ship's hull, where they were applying strengthening polymer to dings from micro-meteorites. After nearly sixteen months outbound, flying straight at the sun like an idiotically slow moth delaying a suicide dive into a porch light, chunks of time seemed to wander off and vanish.

_It's space, Harv,_ Mace replied. _Might not be immediately obvious, but it's **all **night, all the damn time._

"Watch the chatter on the line, boys," Whitby said. In the stillness of the flight deck, her voice sounded loud in her ears. She checked the readings from the suit-feeds. "Harvey, your respiration is a little shallow. You okay?"

She knew from long experience how easy it was to feel cut off in those damnably bulky EVA suits. Add the press of black space all around, and claustrophobia was practically a given, even for the most experienced astronaut. And Harvey, at his best, was hardly a poster boy for placidity. Sending him out to help Mace with routine repairs served as an outlet for his nervous energy and, more importantly, got him away from the zoned hypnosis of the vacuum-symphony murmuring from the ship's glorified wireless, but putting him in a suit meant griping. And more griping. And if they weren't careful, First Officer Kaneda would hear, and then he'd pass word to Captain Pinbacker, and Harvey and Mace and Whitby would all be on report.

Again.

Personally, she couldn't begrudge Harvey his grumbling. Between herself and him and Mace, they'd each averaged over six hours of hull-patch in their last seven shifts. Today, Whitby was the lucky one who got to stay inside and monitor the others. Something for which the project planning team back on Earth hadn't quite accounted when they'd decided to send a manned ship on a mission to jump-start the planet's fading star: the mounting quantity of meteoric debris the _Icarus_ would encounter on her final approach to the sun. Given the sheer lunacy— all punning aside— of the endeavor as a whole, Whitby tended to forgive the oversight. Not that she, like the two outside, wasn't sick of dent-duty. "Next mission," she'd said to Mace, after a particularly grueling spacewalk two days ago, and well away from Pinbacker's electronic spying ears, "we tell them up front, in no uncertain terms: we don't bloody do windows."

In the here-and-now, Mace said: _We're taking more than 'scour' out here, Loinnir. Is Trey there? Is there anything on the scope?_

"Trey's off-deck, Mace." Their shift's navigator was aft, in the galley, starting dinner. "Hold on: I'll check the ping-field." She pushed back her pilot's seat, stood, climbed the metal-mesh steps to the navigator's station. She might have asked the ship's computer to tell her if they were heading into anything chunky, but _Icarus_, in her irritatingly dulcet artificial wisdom, had a habit of requesting "clarification" at the damnedest times. Whitby checked the scope. "Nothing, Mace— no: wait." She had to blink hard, then re-focus, to see it. Then she amped the magnification, and there it was, as plain as the mile-wide parabolic shield at the ship's sunward end: a strip of particles like an arm of the Milky Way in miniature, coming in from their ascendant. They were just starting to pass through the tip of the tentacle.

"Yeah. Looks like we're in for hail, lads. Better than pea-sized."

_That does it, _Mace said. _We're coming in. We can finish this later._

Harvey swore. The specifics were too indistinct for the feed to catch. _I say we finish it now. I'm not coming out here again later_.

_C'mon, Harv, let's go in. Face it, man: you're a shit magnet._

Said Whitby: "And here we all thought it was the gravity pool spiraling off your massive ego, Mace."

_Har-dee har-dee ha—_

A burst of static on the line. Then a scream. A look at the video feeds from the helmets revealed Harvey's face twisted in pain; he was gasping. He cried out again, and his voice filled the flight deck. Whitby knew she'd get nothing useful from him. On the monitor showing the feed from the second suit, the expression on Mace's all-American face was morphing from surprise and shock to a focused, fishbowled scowl.

"Mace: respond," Whitby said. "Harvey is losing air."

_I can see that, Whitby. I'm on my way._ A grunt as the bulk of his suit collided with Harvey's._ Hold still, man. I've got you. You've gotta hold still—_

Harvey shouted in response, his pitch rising in panic: _I'm losing air. Fuck. Fuck. My leg—fuck— Mace—_

Whitby asked: "Mace, do you have him?"

_Yeah— yeah, I've got him. Applying patch now. There. His left leg's hit, Whitby. Multiple lacerations. I'm bringing him in._

Once, years ago, Whitby had seen a spacewalking tech struck by a piece of debris in high Earth orbit. A junk bolt, maybe two inches long, had hit him at sixteen thousand miles an hour. It passed through his helmet— and his skull— like a bullet through shaving cream. He died instantly, of course. In a way, this was worse. At his current rate of respiration, if the patching on his suit was less than a hundred percent tight, Harvey had roughly forty agonizing seconds before his blood turned to gas and he began to asphyxiate. "Harvey," she said, "calm the fuck down. I'm on my way, Mace. Doctor Searle, medical emergency, main airlock." She barked the last words as she left the flight deck and headed at a run forward, along the ship's long main corridor.

No response.

"_Icarus,_ where the hell is Doctor Searle?"

_Doctor Searle is in the forward observation lounge, Whitby._

This had been going on for weeks now: Searle leaving Medical while he was supposed to be on duty, drawn to the lounge at the front of the payload as if the sun were exerting on him not only gravity but something arcane as well. He'd stay up there for hours, communing with his white-hot burning god. Nonetheless, up until this point, he'd continued to respond to his pages.

"Damn it, Searle, answer your—"

"What is happening, Lieutenant?"

First Officer Kaneda emerged from the Oxygen Garden as Whitby passed. Corazon, the ship's secondary botanist, was with him. She was responsible for tracking their oxygen production and consumption; likely, the two of them had been going over stats.

"Harvey and Mace were on hull duty, sir. They're still outside. Harvey's been hit. Meteorite or some such. His suit's been compromised. I can't raise Doctor Searle."

Running, now, with her, Kaneda snapped at his comm tag: "Doctor Reyes, medical emergency at main airlock."

Reyes spoke immediately from their comm tags: _Acknowledged— _He paused, stifling a yawn. Whitby could picture him sitting up on his bunk, shaking sleep from his pepper-and-salt hair. _I'm on my way_.

As they reached the staging area for the main airlock, Whitby asked the air: "_Icarus_, where is Doctor Capa?"

_Doctor Capa is in the payload, Whitby._

She went to the airlock's round white inner door, looked out through the thick glass of the window at its center. Mace and Harvey had yet to enter the outer chamber. As Kaneda unbolted the emergency suit-breaker from its bracket near the suit lockers, Whitby prepped the staging area's medical kit.

"Robert," she said to her comm tag.

A moment's pause, and then Robert Capa spoke from her tag, his tone, as always, practically android-flat. He might have been _Icarus'_ bipedal, less-emotional brother._ Yes, Whitby?_

"We have a medical emergency at the main airlock. Could I trouble you to invite Doctor Searle to kindly fucking join us here?"

Kaneda looked at her sharply. There was looming, heavy motion beyond the window in the airlock's inner door.

_We're coming in,_ Mace said, panting, over the room's intercom._ Closing outer doo_r—

Corazon looked out. "They're in. Harvey is down."

She watched the lights on the chamber's pressurization sequence while Kaneda stood by with the suit-breaker. Getting the damned things on and off when people were upright, unpanicked, and unperforated was bad enough; at best, an astronaut down meant back-breaking frustration. At worst, it meant fatal delay.

The repressurization light went green, and Whitby threw the handle on the inner door. Mace lumbered clear, as clumsy in full gravity as a man made of lead, as she and Kaneda entered the chamber. Harvey was facedown. All down the back of his right leg, the golden metal of his suit was frosted white. For a second, Whitby was perplexed. Then she realized that that was how Mace had saved him: he'd sprayed the tear in Harvey's suit with hull polymer.

She and Kaneda squatted down beside him, got good solid grips on Harvey's cold outer shell. "Ready—" Kaneda said— "— and _lift_."

He and Whitby grunted in unison, straining, and the suit's rough mesh squealed against the deck as they turned the comms officer over. Whitby forced herself to look without hesitating through the view-slit in Harvey's helmet.

Harvey's eyes were still in his skull. Intact. Unhemorrhaged. They were full of pain, but they were looking back at her.

Whitby smiled as she spoke words he likely couldn't hear. "He's alive."

She made way for Kaneda, and they set about getting Harvey's helmet off.

#####

Two minutes earlier, Capa left the payload's control room and re-entered through the public gangway. He ran the length of the metal catwalk that traversed the cathedral-like length of his and Doctor Kirbuk's bomb, his footsteps and breathing lost to the silence and the gray shadows stretching off to the sides, spiked at receding intervals with dusty columns of maintenance-light illumination. At the catwalk's far end, he turned to the right, down a dark and narrow metal corridor; then, without slowing, he swung sharply to the left and entered the forward observation lounge.

The light nearly sent him reeling. It was like a physical presence. It filled his eyes, took his breath. Capa threw his forearm up to shield his face, turned his head, cringed away from the anticipation of heat. Through squinted lids, he could see Searle, immersed in glare, staring out through the computer-controlled tint of the reinforced glass of the room's wall-wide forward window. He called the man's name, got no response. He heard his own voice speak from the doctor's comm tag.

"_Icarus_: filter opacity sixty percent," Capa said, and called again: "Doctor Searle—?"

Searle turned from the window. He was wearing sunglasses. His expression cooled from an eerie ecstasy to an even more eerie blankness as the room dimmed to a normal lighting level. His smile when he saw Capa was absolutely chilling.

"What is it, Robert?" he asked, dreamily.

#####

Outside the airlock chamber, Kaneda lifted Mace's helmet clear, helped the mechanic pull off his chest plate. Most of the crew wore sweat-catchers inside the helmets; perspiration misted from Mace's dark buzzcut as he tugged off a blue Air Force stocking cap. He finished shaking loose of the suit, swept rivulets of sweat from his square jaw with the back of his hand, and dropped to his haunches with the others surrounding Harvey.

"Hey. Harv. Look at me. How're you doing, man?"

Harvey's brow beneath his black hair was clammy and slick with sweat. He seemed to be poised between vomiting and passing out. But he did as Mace said, and focused his black-brown eyes on the mechanic's face, and for that Mace earned Whitby's respect: he'd drawn Harvey's attention, if momentarily, away from his injuries.

"I'm gonna lose my leg," Harvey whispered. He was on his back on the deck, half out of his suit. In addition to chunks of space rock, shrapnel composed of suit-mesh was embedded in his left thigh. Right now, that shrapnel was keeping his leg hooked into the suit; at the same time, it was both bisecting and sealing his femoral artery. Square-shouldered and solid, Doctor Reyes, armed with laser shears, was methodically cutting the suit away from around Harvey's wounds.

"Don't worry, man," said Mace, still breathless, still wired with adrenaline. "Looks like you'll be dead of blood loss well before that."

Harvey's dark eyes filled with tears. "No—"

"Mace, for fuck's sake—" Whitby shot him a shocked and angry glare— "—shut up—!"

A moment later, Searle arrived. Capa was with him. The ship's two medics stabilized Harvey's lacerated leg within the remains of its metal shell, and then Mace and Whitby and the others stretchered the comms officer to sickbay and two hours of surgery.

#####

Unsurprisingly, Captain Pinbacker's first order of business, on being awakened for his shift an hour and a half early, was to call a meeting of the fourteen members of his crew who weren't sedated and hooked to IVs. Roughly half of them were tired and tense; roughly half were still half asleep. Despite Earth Control's protestations to the contrary, the professional astronauts of the _Icarus_ felt themselves, as Harvey had implied, to be split along day-and-night lines. No real accounting for it, save for the fact that half of the crew took direct orders from the captain while the other half normally answered directly to First Officer Akira Kaneda. The P-team, the K-team, which too easily became "A" and "B," an unwritten class distinction, with all its implied resentments. They positioned themselves in the mess accordingly. Mace took a spot next to Whitby against the wall, just inside the door. Of all the crew save Pinbacker, they had the most military experience, and they instinctively positioned themselves where they could best survey their surroundings. Trey took a seat at the nearest table. Searle stood by the galley door, his arms folded against his t-shirted barrel chest, his sunburned face calm and impassive. Corazon, the woman who made no effort to hide the fact that she preferred plants to people, claimed for her own lithe self a bench seat to Mace's left. Looking as if he wanted nothing more than to be skulking in the shadows at the heart of his bomb— or at least to be hiding under the table— Capa practically folded his bony frame into the corner seat next to her.

Mace suppressed a smirk at Capa's obvious discomfort; he settled for watching the arrival of their dayside counterparts. Black-haired Ingrid Barring, the _Icarus_' chief navigator, positioned herself on the other side of the doorway, leaned her angular self against the wall, her hands in her pockets, and pointedly neglected to acknowledge either Mace or Whitby. She kept her icefield-blue eyes fixed straight ahead. Never one to err on the side of compassion, she was no doubt angry about having to assume the main share of Harvey's duties; almost more certainly, she was blaming Harvey's cohorts for said inconvenience. In warm contrast, Therese Moeller, a Berliner by way of Kingston and the mission's mainframe and communications specialist, smiled for them when she entered, followed closely by wiry, chestnut-haired James Sullivan, the ship's chief botanist.

"Mace," he said, amiably, in passing.

"Hey, Sully."

Jim smiled; more than that, he winked at Whitby as he and Moeller claimed the bench opposite Corazon. Mace liked to think that, had Capa been born with a personality, he and Sullivan would have been a whole lot alike. Andrew Cho, Mace's dayside counterpart, came in next; he gave Mace a thoughtful nod and went to stand near Searle. The ship's chief pilot, Cassandra Cassidy, followed him; dark-haired and marble-sculpture delicate, the one among the crew who seemed closest, in Mace's opinion, to the line demarcating humans and angels, Cassie was the the member of the A-team most willing to fraternize with the B-squad. She smiled as she took a seat at the table. "Hi, Trey." Trey gave her one of his crooked wry smiles in response. "Cass." From his peripherals, Mace saw Capa sit up just a bit straighter, spotted a hint of color creeping along his pale jaw as Capa kept his gaze oh-so-casually focused away from the woman at the table. _Well, cue the turtledoves and violins_. Mace fixed his own eyes on a spot on the opposite wall and unleashed the smirk he'd been holding back.

Next in was Armand Reyes, deep in discussion with the mission's chief physicist, Gavrila Kirbuk. Now Mace felt himself straighten up. Short, solid, graceful, Kirbuk radiated energy. A youthful sixty-two, possessed of strong features, thick blonde hair shimmering with silver highlights, and a devastating smile, she was every bit the human being Robert Capa wasn't. At twenty-five, Capa had been a certified genius pretty much his entire life. He had designed the massive nuclear device that the _Icarus _was pushing to the sun. Behind an angelically handsome face and ethereally clear blue eyes (according to the mission's press kit, anyway: to Mace, he was more of a pale-eyed, scrawny little geek)— which purely physical traits had, unfortunately, placed him at the forefront of the publicity for Project Icarus— he was also introverted, almost cripplingly shy, and a mumbler. As a boy, he'd come within inches of being diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. Meeting the public and the press was hell for him; conversely, leaving Earth had practically been a blessing. Russian-born Kirbuk, on the other hand, was brilliant, though not as brilliant as her young American protege. She was, however, an organizer, a communicator, and a charming, sociable woman who was equally comfortable addressing funding committees, peer groups, and members of the World Space Administration, from the janitorial staff on up to the directors of operations. In addition to her scientific prowess— after all, if things went as planned, she was destined to go down in history as Capa's primary help in saving the world— like Cassie, she brought empathy and patience to her surroundings, qualities that could be priceless on a mission slated to last nearly three years.

Kaneda entered the mess next, his face expressionless beneath his tidy black beard. And then came Pinbacker.

Mace nearly snapped to attention as the captain passed. Beside him, Whitby nearly did, too.

Daniel Pinbacker was one of the few men Mace considered physically imposing. Standing six-foot-three, hard with muscle, broad through the chest and shoulders, his dark hair shaved close to his skull, the captain of the _Icarus_ was a perfect example of the military alpha male. He was good-looking, too, in a classic square-jawed way. He handled his people, his ship, and his materiel with level-headed competence; moreover, he was the finest hand-to-hand fighter Mace had ever known, and almost inhumanly fast with a knife.

But something about him made Mace uncomfortable. Maybe it was his eyes. They were dark brown, not alive and sparkling like Cassie's, or broadcasting "kick me" insecurity like Harvey's, but possessed of a tremendous, almost terrible, depth. Looking into the abyss, and realizing the abyss was looking back: admittedly, Mace had paid less than full attention in Philosophy 101, but Nietzsche echoed in his ears the day he and Pinbacker met.

"For those of you who have yet to check the ship's event log-" Pinbacker spoke as he took his place at the center of the room. His voice was quiet but resonant. He cast a mild but piercing look toward the sound of conversation still emanating from Reyes and Kirbuk; the two of them went silent. "— at approximately oh-five-thirty hours today, Communications Officer Harvey suffered impact injuries to his left leg while assisting Lieutenant Mace with minor repairs to our outer hull. Following surgery performed by doctors Searle and Reyes, Mr. Harvey is resting, under sedation, in sickbay."

He paused, offering time for comment; when no one spoke, he brushed the knuckles of his right hand against the top of the table at which Cassie and Trey were seated. "It has come to my attention that response to the situation was less than optimal."

From the calmness of his tone, he might have been commenting on the week's stats for carrot growth from the ship's garden; still, Mace could swear he felt a collective shudder ripple around the room.

Before Pinbacker could look his way, Searle spoke: "I admit, I was in the forward lounge. I was wearing my earbuds." He offered a professionally apologetic smile to the room at large. "I'm afraid I had the Mahler turned up a little too high. When Whitby paged me, I didn't hear her. I'm sorry."

"No." Capa looked troubled. His brushy eyebrows drew together in a scowl. It was an effort for him to speak in front of the entire crew, and as Mace and the others turned his way, he seemed to shrink even more tightly into his corner. "You weren't wearing earbuds, Doctor Searle. You could hear. You turned to me immediately when I said your—"

"Please don't correct me when I'm speaking, Doctor Capa." Searle looked at Capa, pleasantly but a little too directly, until Capa looked uncomfortably away. Then he turned to Pinbacker and the assembly at large. "I was listening to music; I didn't hear Lieutenant Whitby paging me. I accept my fault, I've been put on report, and I apologize."

Pinbacker nodded. "I understand Lieutenant Whitby was alone on the flight deck when Mr. Harvey suffered his accident."

"That's correct." Trey cleared his throat. "I was in the galley, starting dinner for the night— for First Officer Kaneda's crew."

As he spoke, everyone looked Trey's way. Everyone, that is, except Searle. The doctor was again watching Capa, and his eyes reminded Mace of a shark's. Capa seemed not to notice.

"There should be two personnel on-deck during EVA work," Pinbacker said.

Whitby spoke: "That's not in the regs, sir."

"It is now."

"Do you mean _now_-now, Captain, or _nunc pro tunc_-?"

Pinbacker scowled. "I beg your pardon, Lieutenant?"

"If you think for a second that Mace or Trey or I were derelict in the performance of our duties, sir, you are mistaken. Doctor Searle was the one who—"

"Lieutenant Whitby—"

"I am _not_ being put on report over this."

"One more word, Loinnir, _one more,_ and you damn well are—!"

He looked at her with open anger; she looked fiercely back. Whitby was a tall, lean woman of many sharp edges. Elbows, shoulderblades, knees. Tousled ash-blonde hair kept short. Wideset North Sea-blue eyes, high forehead, straight nose, strong jaw. Her mouth seemed to be too sensual for her own liking, and what seemed to be worse— to her way of thinking, anyway— smiles brought to her cheeks the betrayal of dimples. Not that she was anywhere near smiling now. If Pinbacker was their alpha male, she was the crew's alpha female. Accordingly, she and the captain struck sparks off one another. Temperamentally, sometimes sexually. And often, as now, procedurally.

Nevertheless, Whitby was a career officer, she was devoted to the mission, and she followed the chain of command. She relaxed her stance and her expression; she shifted her gaze to a point near Pinbacker's left ear.

"Understood, Lieutenant?" Pinbacker asked, more quietly.

"Understood, Captain. My apologies, sir."

"Accepted." To his entire crew, Pinbacker said: "Dismissed." To doctors Reyes and Searle, he added: "A word, if you please, gentlemen—" He and the medics were discussing Harvey as the others left. In the corridor, Mace clapped Capa on the shoulder. "Way to put Searle in his place, big guy." Capa glared, opened his mouth to reply. "Robert—" Cassie gave Mace a reproving look as she drew Capa away. As she and the boy wonder wished one another a good morning and a good night, they held hands as shyly as a couple of school kids. Mace treated himself to another smirk as he walked back to engineering, to finish his shift and to hand the duty report off to Cho.

#####

A while later, he passed Whitby as they were on their respective ways to and from the showers. She had stalked off to the flight deck after the meeting; she still looked grim now.

Mace drew her to a halt. "Look on the bright side." They were just short of the up-passage leading to the crew quarters, and they were alone in the corridor. "This promises to be the best make-up sex you and Cap'n Dan ever have."

"We're not— Shit." Whitby was Scottish; she sounded it as _shite_. "Things change, Stephen."

Mace felt a chill. He stood with her through a long pause before he asked, very quietly: "Did he hurt you?"

Whitby smiled darkly. "Are you offering to thrash him for me?"

"No. You could do that yourself." He wasn't joking. He'd witnessed the proof in a bar fight. She had big hands for a woman, and arms as long and strong as anchor cable, and once he'd seen her lay out a guy twice her weight with a single punch.

"He hasn't hurt me. Not as such." Whitby looked along the corridor before them, behind. "He's grown quiet, Mace, when we're alone. He's obsessing over the sensor feeds, the raw data pouring in from the sun. He's apt to deny it, but he spends nearly as much time in the forward lounge as Searle."

"You're worried about him."

"I am."

"I don't want you to take this the wrong way, Loinnir—" Mace waited until she met his eyes, and then he was careful to keep his expression sincere. She might be hard-as-nails Whitby, but she was a good-looking woman, and she had to know that he knew they were both standing there in nothing but flip-flops and bathrobes. "— but if there's anything I can do—"

"You already have, Stephen. Thanks for listening." She smiled for him and walked off, toward the shower block. Mace watched her go, then went to the cabin he shared with Cho.

#####

Sixteen crew members, a module containing eight tiny residential cabins, eight narrow bunks. The design team's effort to allocate more space for equipment and supplies. The living space aboard the spindly _Icarus_ was designed for old-fashioned submarine-style hot-bunking, which, over the months, had led to a code of etiquette that, most simply distilled, meant no sex in your roomie's cot. Which, in other words, meant sex anywhere but in bed. Which, in turn, had made finding trysting spots possibly the most creative endeavor for those of the crew so inclined. More than once, Mace had spotted Moeller and Sullivan sneaking through engineering, one or the other of them carrying a blanket, on their way back from the storage hold. Cassie and Capa spent a suspicious amount of time together in the physics lab-slant-office off the Oxygen Garden— and in the payload itself, a situation practically begging for jokes co-joining big bangs with very, _very _tiny ones. Mace and Barring had shared a handful of encounters in the engine room, generically satisfying but hardly memorable. Whitby, with uncanny accuracy, pinpointed the problem while she and Mace were out on comms-tower maintenance: _Kind of like banging a glacier, isn't it? _When Mace retorted, "Now, how in the hell would you know that—?", she'd only taken her own favorite advice and cut the chatter on the feed. She and Pinbacker, for their own part, were rumored to favor the forward observation lounge.

Following his shower, Mace had one more stop before bed, and sex had nothing to do with it. He put on a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt and went to meet Doctor Kirbuk in the recreation area off the mess. She was waiting for him, seated with a mug of tea at one of the room's tables, looking out from behind an array of silver chess pieces. They played almost every day, sometimes before her shift, sometimes before his, alternating the disadvantage of first-wakening and end-of-shift weariness.

"Your play is refreshingly straightforward, Stephen," Kirbuk said, as she studied the board, the game saved from yesterday.

Mace smiled as he seated himself opposite her, on the black set's side. "Dumb, you mean. Come on, Doc, I can handle the truth."

"No." She reached out and with delicate fingertips slid a bishop slantwise across the board. "You see an opening, you go for it. You act. Playing with Robert or with Kaneda, one can wait for hours for the next move. At my age, that can be a serious consideration." She smiled wryly as Mace leaned in for a closer look at the pieces. "By the way— how goes it with the plain-spoken Lieutenant Whitby?"

"Case you haven't noticed, Gav, I think she's already spoken for."

"At the meeting, it sounded more to me like she was spoken _at_, not _for_."

Mace paused with his hand on a knight. "Are you trying to put me off my game?"

"Forgive me, Stephen." Kirbuk met his eyes. Hers, like his, were near-sapphire blue; hers were comfortably unreadable. "The women in my family were matchmakers centuries before we were scientists. It's in my blood. You'd make a fine couple."

"More like a compound, you mean."

"If you wish."

"Whaceonium?" Mace grinned. "Some kind of radioactive salt, maybe?"

Kirbuk chuckled. "Make your move. I'm due in the payload, and it's past your bedtime."

#####

The next night, they were still traveling through the tendril of meteorites. The field was too wide to skirt, and the chunks were too many and too large to risk suitwork. There was dust now, as well, as fine and dense as fog, and it was interfering with the ship's navigational sensors. Trey worked to get a clear picture of their surroundings. Whitby and Mace visited a groggy Harvey in sickbay, and then she headed for the flight deck while Mace went on general maintenance duty, which duty included the possibility- or not- of salvaging Harvey's EVA suit.

#####

At oh-three-hundred hours, there came a knock at the door frame of the garden-side physics lab. Capa's social mind was a moment slow to acknowledge the sound. He looked up from his work pad, saw through the semi-opacity of the privacy strips a woman's coltish, dark-haired form. Similar to but not quite Corazon's. And the botanist had passed by minutes ago on her way to a late night-shift lunch; she'd offered to bring Capa a sandwich, and he'd declined.

"Come in, Cass," he said.

The ship's primary pilot pushed in through the heavy plastic strips. Her smile was slight and apologetic. Capa smiled slightly back; he could see the circles darkening the skin beneath Cassie's brown eyes.

"I couldn't sleep," she said. She had in her right hand a battered paperback. "Could I sit in here for a while?"

A hundred implications in the slump of her shoulders, the frown hovering about her brow. He didn't say, _The garden is right there, Cassie. Go read to the tomatoes._

He did say, mildly, his tone not matching the concern he felt: "Maybe you should talk to Doctor Reyes about that."

She stopped short of chuckling. "Drugs? An hour or two in the Earth Room? No, thanks. I'm not crazy. It's that just the dreams are getting—"

She let her voice trail off. Watching her, Capa couldn't suppress a shudder. She saw; then again, she seemed to see everything. Pilots had to be observant, after all. She came nearer, and Capa didn't quite meet her eyes.

"You, too?" she asked, gently.

"Yes."

"Are you still falling?"

"Even if the gravity is artificial, technically, we're still falling every second of our—" He stopped himself. "Yeah, I'm still falling."

"Falling into the sun."

Cassie set her book on his workbench. She drew Capa into her arms and held him. He let her. For a moment he stood motionless, not tensed, not relaxed, simply existing in the context of contact. Then he put his arms around her and held her, closely, in return. Matched sighs as they relaxed. She eased back slightly. Capa read the cue. Didn't misread it this time, as he had months ago. He eased back slightly, too, and kissed her, tenderly.

Cassie settled against him, her body molding itself to his as she kissed him back. "Mmm."

"I— I could take a break," Capa murmured, when they broke for air. "_We_ could take a break. Maybe out by the strawberries."

"Corazon nearly put Jim and Therese out of the airlock when she caught them 'taking a break' by the strawberries, didn't she? And Pinbacker nearly let her."

Capa laughed. Cassie joined him. It felt good. Satisfying. For him, it was also a surprising but absolute truth: that simply knowing he remembered how to laugh could be as almost as fulfilling as sex, even with a woman he frankly, if surreptitiously, adored.

"Maybe you'd better read," he said.

Still smiling, she let him go. "Is there coffee?"

Capa nodded in the direction of the one-cup brewer on the corner of the room's wall counter. "Pods in the top drawer."

"Want some?"

"Mm hm."

Cassie rounded up two plastic mugs, two coffee pods, while Capa got back to work. He was nearly gone again, off among his equations, his own private version of reality, when Cassie placed a mug by his elbow. Artificial creamer, no sweetener. He murmured his thanks and kept working. She took her own mug and her paperback and curled herself into the chair in the corner. For her, as for him, caffeine was more a calming element, a focusing drug, than a stimulant. Within an hour, she would be asleep. The part of his mind that wasn't composed of numbers thought that he could live with her like this, quite contentedly, forever.

#####

And then the sky split open.

#####

#####


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Welcome back, fight fans! Occurs to me that, as usual, I forgot the disclaimer: _Sunshine_ and its original characters are the property of Danny Boyle, Alex Garland, and Fox Searchlight Pictures. Whitby and the other made-up folks are mine. I'm making no money off of this. That said, there's a big, weird world o' hurt on the horizon. Have at it- and, as always, thanks for the comments. They're very much appreciated!

#####

#####

Two minutes before Capa saw the sky split, ship's time was coming up on oh-three-hundred, the doldrums of the nightshift, where energy levels found themselves mired in a post-lunch Sargasso sea of digestion and dinner and quitting time were faint promises on the featureless horizon.

Kaneda was on the flight deck, taking a turn at the controls. Trey was on the upper deck, at Navs, still trying to tune the sensors to see through the cloud of dust and rock that surrounded the ship. Mace was in the gym, doing military presses and wondering whether he should muster his powers of tact and compassion toward his crewmates and offer to trade places with Whitby, who was rattling about in the galley. It was her turn on dinner duty, and her cooking, putting it charitably, fell somewhere between "battery" and "attempted homicide."

In the galley, their lanky culinary felon was chopping a pile of the ship's ubiquitous carrots. Sullivan, in a t-shirt and lounging pants, walked in, lifted the lid on a saucepot as he passed the stove, took a sniff, flinched.

"Good God. Tell Mace and the others they have my deepest sympathies."

He continued to the refrigeration unit and rummaged himself a box of the add-water-stir-and-freeze glop that passed for vanilla ice cream. Whitby angled the tip of her knife his way.

"I catch you eating that out of the carton, Jimbo, and you'll be tonight's secret ingredient."

Sullivan grinned, went to the cupboard for a bowl. "For the sake of my crewmates, I'd almost be willing to make that sacrifice."

Whitby's expression remained as steely as the blade of the knife in her hand, but Sullivan saw a smile in her eyes as she went back to her chopping.

#####

Many of the crew had trouble sleeping. Ingrid Barring's theory was that, after so many months of tedium and isolation, few of them wanted to spend six to eight uninterrupted hours alone in their own heads.

The insomniacs all had different ways of coping. Moeller, for instance, watched chips of old films, or replayed her messages from her family on Earth. She refused to wear headphones; passing the smoked privacy glass of her cabin, you'd hear soft voices, music. Sullivan, like clockwork, made his way to the galley for a snack at oh-two-forty-five. Cassidy kept company with Capa, however loosely you cared to define the term. And Barring split up the interminable passage through the nightly rest period by saving her shower time for oh-two-thirty.

Just before oh-three-hundred, still toweling her hair as she emerged from the short corridor leading to the head and the showers, she nearly collided with Corazon, proceeding forward from the direction of the galley.

"Excuse me," Barring said.

She tried not to sound brusque; with anyone else, she might have succeeded.

"Hmph," Corazon replied, in a tone that suggested Barring might as well have been a rhinoceros set loose in the corridor.

Barring, seeing a napkin-wrapped packet in Corazon's hand, made a rare second attempt to be sociable. "Don't feed the second-string physicist," she said, with maybe a third of a wry smile.

Corazon frowned, passing, then smiled back. She gestured with the wrapped sandwich. "He certainly won't feed himself—"

There was a tremendous thud. A lung-compressing, encompassing, concussive _whumph_.

The entire corridor skewed sideways. And, that suddenly, the bulkhead next to Corazon disappeared. So did the up-corridor to the crew quarters.

The pieces— at least three meters across and two meters high, combined— ripped away from the ship like a giant lid being pulled off a tin.

Behind Corazon, they tumbled off into space.

Barring was thrown backwards, into the bulkhead behind her. The air slammed from her lungs. She staggered, tripped, hit her knees hard on the waffled decking.

From the deck to her left, Corazon turned toward the gaping hole in the opposite bulkhead. Barring froze, staring at the botanist and at the sudden blackness beyond her.

And then the air punched into both of them, from behind, from both sides, as the atmosphere rushed out into the void.

Aft, ahead of the access to the flight deck, and ahead, just short of Medical and Comms, the emergency bulkheads sealed the corridor. The decompression siren whooped—

— and went silent.

In the ten seconds of consciousness remaining to her, Barring wondered why.

Then she realized: _The air is gone._

A prickling, a burning, under her skin, in her eyes. In complete vacuum, she would have maybe ten seconds of consciousness. She remembered her training, forced herself to breathe out.

Nine seconds.

An emergency shelter three meters to her right. She threw herself toward it, grasped the door handle with fingers already going numb.

Eight seconds.

Motion behind her as Corazon tried to stand, tried to cross the corridor.

Seven seconds.

Barring's eyes felt as though they'd been filled with burning hydrogen. Her vision was going. She fought the urge to take a breath—

Six seconds.

— as she saw Corazon stumble again to her knees. Still gripping the door handle, Barring leaned across the corridor and reached for the botanist with fingers she could no longer feel—

Five seconds.

Her throat and chest felt as though they were filling with lead. The blood in her veins, the water in her body, in her eyes, were turning to gas. She didn't know if her feet were still on the deck.

Four seconds.

Her face twisting with effort, Corazon raised her arm and reached out, and Barring saw their fingers touch. The prickling under her skin was a fire now, an agony—

Three seconds.

There came a second impact.

The corridor lurched sideways. Tipped. The last thing Barring saw was Corazon falling into space from the gap in the bulkhead. Blind, Barring fell into the shelter and clawed the door shut. She heard the hiss of the emergency oxygen. She heard herself scream in pain and fear.

And then she blacked out.

#####

In the galley, the first impact threw Whitby and Sullivan off their feet. Things spilled, splashed. Whitby swore as her left arm caught a splatter of sauce. In the gym, the resistance bar was jolted out of Mace's hands. Falling, it nearly caught him in the head. The lights went out, revived as blue-tinged emergency illumination a heartbeat later. He was up a second after that, running for the flight deck.

#####

The first impact hit aft of the garden. The deck bucked violently beneath Capa's feet. He nearly fell. The mugs, half full, skittered off of table- and counter-tops and plummeted, splattering coffee. Cassie started awake, dropped her book. She pushed up out of the corner chair as the decompression alert went off in the main corridor. Capa stared at her in confusion. For a second, not quite fully aware, she stared back.

Then she grabbed his hand, hauled him through the privacy strips to the landing overlooking the garden. "Capa, come on—"

The soles of their shoes thudded together on the metal stairs. Halfway down, hearing the klaxon whooping in the passageway outside the garden, feeling the aftershocks jolting through the infrastructure of the ship, Capa realized where she was taking him: there was an emergency decompression shelter forward of the garden's double doors.

Which slid heavily shut when they reached the bottom step. Capa ran to the doors, hooked his fingers into the handle-indent on the right-side panel, and pulled.

"No— Capa, no." Cassie put her hand on his shoulder. He stopped pulling. She leaned in and up, looked out through the window in the left-side door panel. "There's a hull breach," she said. "This sector, maybe one over—"

"_Icarus_," Capa said, "verify location of hull breach."

_Icarus_ didn't respond.

Another impact, directly overhead. They looked up. A body. A fucking _body _had hit the middle window. A skull shattered into a comet-tail of blood and bone against the thick glass. Then something huge and dark, an edge, a metallic corner, struck the window and tumbled away. A building-shadow raced across the garden and was gone.

"Oh, my God—" Cassie said.

Capa crossed to the wall-comm mounted outside Corazon's office, repeated: "_Icarus_, verify location of hull breach."

No response.

"First Officer Kaneda, respond."

Silence from the feed.

"Mace? Whitby?" Capa said. "Flight deck: respond, please."

From the window where the heavy tumbling _something_ had struck came a sharp popping sound.

The lights flickered. Cassie brushed past Capa, heading for the workbench Corazon called her office.

"There's no decompression closet in here," she said. "But the whole room is designed to act as a radiation shelter. If there's any radiation, that is—"

Capa looked up at the damaged window. A crack was forming in the glass. "Can you close the shutters?"

He heard the grating overhead as the first crack spread, as a second and third sprung from it like tributaries.

At Corazon's workstation, Cassie typed a password, access codes, commands. Her eyes were intent on the flatscreen monitor. "Taking the radiation sensors offline now—"

Capa joined her. With luck, _Icarus_, blind to any threat from radiation, would have to trust the judgment of her human crewmates.

"Entering radiation-shield override," Cassie said.

The screen at Corazon's workstation flickered, then froze. Capa rested his hand on Cassie's shoulder as the two of them held their breath—

— _possibly,_ he thought, _for a very, **very** long time_—

_Radiation protocol initiated. Shields closing. _A pre-recorded message. Not _Icarus_' "live" voice. Jolting, not only because of the implication— that the mainframe had been damaged— but because of how easy it was to tell._  
_

Cassie straightened away from Corazon's workstation. She and Capa watched the articulated lead-gray shutters unfold and slide up and over the garden windows.

"I'm not sure if the seal will be air-tight," she said. "If it isn't—"

"Cassie—"

"— the last of the oxygen is yours. You know that. You're vital to the mission. I'm not."

Capa couldn't meet her eyes. "Let's have another look at the corridor, try to get the doors open."

#####

With comms down, those aft of the breach, like Mace, made their way to the designated meet-up point at the flight deck. There, joining Trey and Kaneda, Mace, Whitby, and Sullivan witnessed a horrifying vista through the forward windows: the crew quarters tumbling away from the ship, amid shattered shards of one of the rotating communications towers.

A dead hiss from the comm feeds. Static and scrambling from the monitors, as _Icarus_ re-routed her functions. Whitby broke away, ran for the corridor heading forward. "Dan—!"

Mace and the others followed her a second later. Whitby was clawing at the horizontal midseam of the emergency bulkhead that blocked the passageway, ramming the heavy alloy top-panel with her shoulder. It was the only time Mace had ever seen her lose control.

"We can't get through," she said. "Mace, it's sealed. We have to get it open—"

"Loinnir, no. No." Mace grasped her upper arm. She swung on him, stopped just short of hitting him. He met her panicked eyes. "You saw. We all did. There's a hull breach. The living quarters are gone."

#####

Methodically, they called for responses from the comm links. Nothing from Searle, Corazon, Harvey, or Capa. Nor from Pinbacker, Barring, Cassidy, Kirbuk, Moeller, or Reyes.

Mace nodded toward Whitby. "Try me."

"Mace, respond," Whitby said. No sound came from his tag.

"_Icarus_," Mace said, "how many crew are on board?"

_Unable to specify at this time._

"_Icarus_, where is Captain Pinbacker?"

_Unable to locate at this time._

"_Icarus_," said Kaneda, "give me a list of crew currently registering pulse and respiration."

_Unable to specify at this time._

"Identify speaker, _Icarus_," Kaneda continued.

_First Officer Akira Kaneda._

Kaneda nodded at Mace.

"Identify speaker, _Icarus_," Mace said.

_Unable to identify at this time._

"Verify pulse and respiration for Whitby, _Icarus_."

_Unable to verify at this time._

"She can't tell whether we're alive or dead," Trey said.

"She's lost the em-names on up." Whitby looked at Mace. "At least. That's top-level mainframe function."

Kaneda nodded. "There could be a coolant leak. Or worse. Mace, Trey: get on it. Whitby, Sullivan: head out with patching. We need to seal the hull—"

Sullivan was looking numbly at the emergency bulkhead. "There could be survivors on the other side right now, sir—"

"If anyone reached the emergency shelter, they will have air enough to wait. If we cut through the bulkhead without knowing what is beyond it, we risk further depressurization."

"Wasting time," Whitby said. "C'mon, Jim." She patted his shoulder, ran for the aft airlock. Sullivan followed.

#####

Before she sealed her helmet, she took a deep breath and wiped the tears from her eyes.

#####

In less than five minutes, she and Sullivan were suited up and leaving the aft airlock. They shared a tether line at waist level; in addition, they had tethered to their wrists bags of cutting tools and bound sheets of bond-patch. They hauled themselves forward along the hull on inch-thick maintenance cable. Once they reached the main break, Whitby glanced inside. No sign of bodies. Sealed pressure doors three meters forward, two meters aft. A green light on the decompression locker across the way. Someone was alive, awaiting rescue. No time to gawk at the size of the hole in the bulkhead, which was three and a half meters across if it was a finger's-width: she started cutting the first piece of sheeting, signaled for Sullivan to stand by with the smaller pieces of glue-sheet that would knit themselves to the bond-sheeting and set on contact. With luck, they'd have the breached sector re-sealed in under ten minutes.

Sullivan hesitated, wrangling the glue-sheets. His helmet was facing forward along the hull. Whitby turned, looked where he was looking.

A body was caught up in the infrastructure ahead of the comms-tower assembly. Whitby focused hard, trying to see what Sullivan was seeing, through the obfuscating dust.

It was Therese Moeller. Her dark skin was rimed gray; she was hanging over one of the alloy beams like a shipwreck survivor clinging to a spar. Only no current stirred her limbs. She was absolutely still.

_Terry_— Sullivan said. Whitby heard; the localized inter-suit radio feeds were functional, even if the ship's mainframe-driven comms weren't.

She saw him reach for the hook on his end of the waist-tether. "No, Sully."

He ignored her. He unhooked his tether, fired his suit thrusters, and flew toward the infrastructure. When he was even with the comms-tower assembly, the remaining arm spun suddenly into view, out of the dust. It hit Sullivan like a ten-meter-long baseball bat. Over her suit-feed, Whitby heard him grunt in pain, watched in horror as he was knocked head over heels toward the outer edge of the shadow trailing the solar shield. Whitby tethered the repair kit to the _Icarus_, oriented herself, fired her thrusters, and leaped after him. The rough rule was that you had an eight-count, at speed or in free-fall, before you left the protection of the shield and the sun vaporized you. She caught Sullivan at "four."

And at that moment, upside-down, with the perfect clarity of adrenaline, she saw something. Through a break in the dust cloud surrounding the ship, at a distance of nearly a mile, she could see the wreckage of the crew quarters caught— at approximately eleven o' clock, piloting orientation— in the gridwork of beams supporting the edge of the solar shield.

No time for staring, though. No time at all. She fired her left-hand suit-thrusters to turn herself and Sullivan back toward the ship, the right-hand thrusters to trim their angle. "Jim, thrusters. Now—!"

She didn't know if he was conscious, let alone alive. To her relief, his thrusters fired. They hurtled back toward the _Icarus_.

Now, however, she had to wonder how much velocity they'd lost relative to the ship. The chalk-white hull was slipping by as they approached. Whitby unclipped her cable gun, fired a hook. If she missed, or if the hook failed to penetrate the hull, she and Sullivan would be left behind. If they hooked in too far aft, they could be dragged into the plasma wash from the ship's engines.

She grunted as the hook caught, as roughly fifteen meters of cable went rigid between herself and the hull. She triggered the cable retrieval and held on tight as she and Sullivan were reeled back to the ship.

With one hand still on his suit, she re-hooked their tethers to the maintenance cable running the length of the hull. She turned him so that she could see through his visor.

"Sullivan," she said. "Jim, are you ready to work now?"

He was wincing, in pain or shock or both. She saw him nod. _Y—yes. I'm sorry, Whitby— I'm— Thank you f-for—_

"No problem. C'mon, let's get at it."

#####

The mainframe room was aft, between the flight deck and engineering, and dark. Trey walked in first, slipped, and fell flat on his back. The deck was wet. He yelled when his trousers and the back of his shirt soaked through; he yelled louder when he put his hands on the deck to push himself up.

For a second, Mace ignored him. He knew that the liquid on the floor was coolant; he knew that touching it was like being sprayed with Freon. He moved slowly into the room, his eyes fixed on the two-meter-high tank that housed the ship's mainframe.

It was intact. No warping in the alloy framing. No obvious cracks in the thick Plexiglas sides.

"Don't be a baby, Trey," he said. He reached down, caught Trey's arm, helped him up.

"Fuck—" Trey grimaced as he wiped his hands on his shirt. "That shit _burns_."

"Don't I know it. You can wash it off later." Still careful of his footing, Mace approached the tank. The clear blue liquid stood roughly six feet deep. The upper edge of the top motherboard was exposed to a height of roughly six inches. "Looks like we had a slosh, not a leak. Check the stats: I'm thinking _Icarus _had time to reconfigure when this board was exposed. The loss of signal from the comm links probably has more to do with us losing that tower."

Trey moved, stiff-kneed, cautiously, to the ops panel on the wall behind the tank. "I think you're right," he said, scanning the monitors, the mostly green array of go-lights. "Now what?"

"We top off the tank, check the frame and the mooring, and give that board a chance to cool back down. If it's cooked, we can swap it out later. We can recover the spilled coolant, too."

"Okay."

The main parts locker was positioned between the mainframe room and engineering. Mace keyed his lock-code at the hatch, went in, came out with two twenty-liter box-bottles of coolant.

"We're gonna need at least eight more of these," he told Trey. He set the bottles on the deck by the tank, climbed the ladder to the maintenance gantry above the mainframe. "Here. Pass one up."

#####

Outside, Whitby continued her repairs after Sullivan signaled to her that he was going in. He didn't have to say a word: she could see globules of blood floating in his helmet.

"Sully, tell Kaneda we're good to repressurize," she said. Sullivan answered with a weary thumbs-up, hooked his end of the waist-tether to the maintenance cable, and hauled himself toward the airlock. Whitby went back to reinforcing the patch over the hull breach.

Minutes later, another form in a bulky golden suit approached from the direction of the aft airlock: Mace, armed with a patch kit of his own. He passed Whitby, continued forward to the Oxygen Garden. When Whitby finished with the hull, she joined him in fixing a potentially deadly branching of cracks in the central greenhouse window.

Before they went in, they retrieved Moeller's body.

#####

Two hours later, Mace and Whitby were back inside. They went to the Oxygen Garden, pulled off each other's counter-pressure vests, and lay side by side on their backs in the fern stand, just breathing the pure cool air.

#####

The two of them learned about Harvey at the first crew meeting called by their newly designated captain. Kaneda and Trey had discovered Searle, unconscious, on the deck just inside the entrance to sickbay. He had a broken right humerus and a bleeding gash in his forehead.

Harvey was dead.

He was still lying on his cot in Medical, and he looked to be asleep. There'd been an air bubble in his IV line. Or, possibly, a spike in his sedative when the power fluxed. Without an autopsy, it would be impossible to know.

He and Moeller were their two known deceased. Among the missing, presumed dead, were Captain Pinbacker, Doctor Corazon, Doctor Reyes, Chief Mechanic Cho, and Doctor Kirbuk. Kaneda and Trey had found Capa and Cassie, shaken but largely unharmed, in the Oxygen Garden.

"No other bodies near the ship, in the breached sector," Whitby said. Her tone was flat. She felt very tired. "What about the crew quarters?"

"No one could be alive out there," Mace said.

"There's a chance that—"

Kaneda cut her off. "We tend to the known survivors," he said. "We save our resources for repair and focus on the mission. Salvage can wait."

#####

All of them bore scrapes or bruises. In addition to Searle's broken arm, which Kaneda set with the help of _Icarus' _holographic auto-doc program, Sullivan had two cracked ribs. Barring, having overstayed her mere seconds' welcome in complete vacuum, was the most badly hurt of the injured. Under Searle's supervision, Kaneda and Trey had placed her, unconscious and sedated, in the one-cot hyperbaric chamber in Medical. Now, hours after she'd been taken from the depressurization shelter opposite the hull breach, her extremities were badly swollen; her face was nearly unrecognizable. Her blue eyes were masses of bloody hematoma.

"I've given her a dose of painkiller," Searle told the gathered survivors. "The swelling should subside within eight hours, though she's apt to experience scarring. Right now, she's blind. But neither of her retinas detached; if the liquid in her eyes doesn't turn septic, she'll get her vision back in a day or two."

"And if it does turn septic?" Cassie asked.

"Gangrene," Mace said. He looked at Searle. "Right?"

Searle nodded. "She loses both eyes."

"Oh, God," Cassie whispered.

She wrapped her arms across her chest, huddled near Capa. She and the physicist were practically sharing a small-animal fugue-state shudder. Mace frowned. He was thinking of Gavrila Kirbuk, and he could feel tears crowding against the backs of his eyes. He turned on Searle. "Tell me you were in Medical when it happened. Tell me you weren't jerking off up in the forward lounge when we were hit."

"I was right here. I was knocked out—"

"Oh, really—?"

"Mace—" Kaneda said.

"Harvey is dead for no reason. Barring is—"

"What was I supposed to do?" Searle frowned at him incredulously. "Break down the pressure door while the hull was still breached?"

"I don't know. You could have— There must have been something—"

"Hate to tell you this, Mace, but medicine's a little more complicated than patching holes and filling dents."

Mace took a swing at him. Whitby blocked his arm; she and Kaneda bowled into Mace, grabbed him.

#####

In the hours that followed, Mace focused stonily on the punchlist.

He checked the repairs to the Oxygen Garden window and to the hull. He fortified the repairs from inside the ship; he rerouted conduits and wiring. Their air and water recyclers were online and functioning; the non-emergency lighting had reset itself when the emergency bulkheads retracted.

With Trey's help, he verified that the mainframe's exposed motherboard was, in fact, undamaged.

He and Whitby and Trey worked to reroute and restore the communications functions that were lost when the comms tower broke away.

And, seeing the damage to the ship, working his way through the pattern of repairs, he pieced together a picture of what had happened: a meteorite had struck the crew quarters, and then the quarters themselves or a second meteorite hit the comms tower.

He imagined they'd never know for sure.

#####

The hours Mace spent on the punchlist and on speculation, Capa spent in the payload. The cavernous silence. A gray world unto itself. He realized, verifying density, mass, stability, radiation levels, numbers upon numbers upon numbers, that it was too easy for him to focus on the task at hand. He was too removed from the tragedy they'd suffered. He told himself he was experiencing shock, but he knew he had never really been connected to the world as other people were.

Gavrila was gone. He'd known her for ten years. She'd always been kind to him; her genius had always been tempered with patience and generosity, a rare thing in a scientist of her caliber. He thought of her now and felt nothing.

Daniel Pinbacker, the sharp-eyed warrior chosen to save the world, had treated him, gruffly, absolutely, sincerely, like a son. He had been a good, creative chess player. He would have done anything to keep Capa safe, to guard the payload, to preserve the mission. Capa thought of him and felt nothing.

The others, with whom he'd shared the interior of Earth's one true starship for over a year: stable Reyes, Moeller with her humor, her smile, Cho a welcome even-tempered buffer between the crew and Mace. Corazon, slender and sharp as a wasp, working hard against type by perpetually trying to make sure Capa kept himself fed. He thought of them and felt in himself his surroundings in miniature, in mind-size. Perfectly gray. Perfectly calm.

Perfectly empty of emotion.

#####

When Cassie came to check on him, in the payload's control room, he was glad.

#####

_Capa?_

The one word, through the wall-comm mounted by the door. The comm tags hanging against his chest still weren't working.

"Come in, Cass."

He reached over, keyed the lock code. Cassie pushed in through the heavy gangway door.

"How's it going?" She was trying to look less exhausted, more certain, than she actually felt. He could tell.

"Well." He offered her a quiet smile. "We're in good shape on this end."

She smiled back, just a trace. "Ninety-six hours," she said, looking at the countdown timer. "After all these months, where did the time go?"

"It's all relative, Cass. Past and future. Before and after." He saved his work on his touchpad, joined her at the control panel. "The question is, we make it to the launch point, we deliver the payload: then what?"

"Then we stick with the plan. We go home."

That simple. While he held few doubts about the soundness of the science behind the mission— the numbers were there, and either they described reality or, through his error, they didn't— sometimes, rarely, he indulged in the belief that they as a crew might make it home again after they delivered the payload to the sun. Sometimes, even more rarely, and, he realized, a little selfishly, he indulged in the hope that Cassie had humanity enough for two. "You don't have to be brave for me, Cass."

"Yeah." She looked at him directly, and her eyes were sad but affectionate. "I kinda think I do."

#####

They fell as a group into a funk of exhaustion, disbelief, and shock. Seeking security in community, or simply being afraid, for now, to be alone, people took to bunking in the mess. Having verified that the payload was intact and stable, Capa rested in his usual corner. Mace, staggering in after finishing a marathon of repairs and systems checks, found him and Cassie curled up together like puppies, fitfully napping; the mechanic simply collapsed on the bench across from them and slept. Kaneda was on the flight deck, alone, piloting. Searle tended to Barring in sickbay.

A loss of time, of sense of shift: Mace woke when he smelled cooking. Capa was up, scrambling vegetables and tofu. The physicist rounded up the others; save for Barring, they all sat together and ate. Mace watched Cassie staring at the glass beside her plate and found himself thinking, as their chief pilot had to be thinking, of one thing for which they could be thankful: _At least there's clean water_.

A day passed. All of the able-bodied crew worked, ate, and slept in staggered stages. Even after Trey and Whitby restored internal comms late on the afternoon of the day following the collision, there was very little chatter over the ship's internal feeds. Kaneda helped Searle to tend to Harvey's and Moeller's remains. Therese had little choice in her disposition at this point: replacing the gasified blood in her veins with embalming solution was impossible. She'd have no long ride home in the mortuary freezer. But Moeller, as Sullivan was quick to remind them, had loved the sun; she wouldn't mind being committed to the light: cremation beyond the solar shield's outer edge. Harvey's directives, on the other hand, clearly specified interment on Earth, if at all possible. He'd wanted to go home from day one; there'd be no burial in the void for him.

That evening, Kaneda called a crew meeting. He did most of the talking, with an emphasis more on status than on morale: They were now a crew of nine, but the payload was intact, they had water, heat, and atmosphere, the recyclers were functioning, and they had navigational capability. In short, the mission was still on.

They were three days from launch.

#####

That evening, with Mace's help, Trey continued his attempt to restore their communications with Lunar Control, some ninety million miles in their wake. Finally, after an hour of working in complete silence, Mace asked, his tone bone-dry: "When we get this thing up and running, if we were to ask for one, how long would it be until we could expect a rescue team?"

"Bet the IndoRuss alliance could have a salvage crew here in three days," Trey replied. "Of course, they'd claim the ship— and sell the payload."

"I'd love to see Capa's reaction to that."

Trey stripped all the expression from his face. "'Puh-please duh-duh-don't tuh-touch my buh-buh-buh-bomb.'"

"'Unless you're Cassie,' of course," Mace added. "'Thuh-then you can tuh-tuh-touch my damn buh-bomb all you wah-wah-want.'" He smirked at Trey; they shared a chuckle.

#####

A bit later than that, Whitby was taking her turn at the ship's controls. Their chief pilot, having surrendered the joystick, was off following their junior physicist. Since the accident, when Cassie wasn't on the flight deck, or sitting with Barring, who was barely conscious and only beginning to regain her sight, she had appointed herself Capa's unofficial guardian. Under less-grim circumstances, Whitby might have found a joke in that: it was not unlike a Cavalier King Charles spaniel essaying the role of spike-collared mastiff. As it was, in the dark quiet of the flight deck, the mission's second pilot was subconsciously appreciating the shocked mind's ability to slice grief and hopelessness into bite-sized pieces. Whitby felt the loss of Daniel Pinbacker like a woman freshly cut, sometimes watching dumbly as the blood started to flow, sometimes feeling the sting. She stared at nothing, then at the monitors, in turn, as mechanically as a security camera. The forward view through the windows: the spindle-length of the ship, the immensity of the shield, the distant twisted wreckage of the crew quarters, the dull golden glow of the dust cloud that still surrounded them. The displays showing their course, their speed, their telemetry. Ten lines on the master bio-stats screen. Ten sets of numbers. Pulse, temperature, and respiration: the readouts from the comm tags of their ten survivors—

Ten.

Not nine.

Whitby sat forward, her eyes locked on that tenth line. A pulse-rate of fifty-seven. Respiration: ten breaths per minute. Core temperature well below norm. All as if the owner were comatose. The signal itself was spotty.

"_Icarus_, identify signal source, bio-stats line ten."

_Unable to identify at this time, Whitby._

Whitby called over the general feed: "Captain Pin— Captain Kaneda, all available personnel to the flight deck, please."

#####

All of them save for Barring were gathered around the pilot's station, staring at that tenth line of bio-data.

"Whoever it is," Searle said, "they're in bad shape. Numbers like those— that's practically comatose."

"It's not an echo from the ship, is it?" Capa asked.

"No. I've cleaned up the signal; I've checked and cross-checked it." Trey, standing behind Whitby's chair, nodded toward the forward window, the dark wreckage of the crew quarters snagged in the gridwork at the upper edge of the solar shield. "Someone is alive out there."

#####

#####

#####


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Sorry for the delay, but this one turned out to be a monster. Thank you for the comments; thanks, too, to those who've added this stuff to their favorites lists. Things are going to get big, weird, and unhappy now, folks. Hope you're enjoying the trip!

#####

#####

It was known, morbidly, as "the coffin." The WorSpAd EVA rescue-and-recovery capsule was basically an obelisk-shaped eight-foot-long space suit. No arms, no legs, a single view-slit at roughly face level. Insulated; pressure-activated heating cells buried within a thick soft lining of therma-foam. Room, at a squeeze, for two. The goal was to get the victim inside as quickly as possible, seal, and pressurize. The _Icarus _was equipped with one coffin, kept in aft storage with the ship's main complement of EVA suits.

Kaneda and Mace guided the capsule, tethered, between them, on the long climb to the wreckage of the crew quarters. Whitby, towing a bag of tools and cutting gear, rounded out the rescue party. The three of them were the crew's best at suit-work; moreover, Whitby, a seasoned wreck diver in the oceans and seas back home, knew her way around tight spaces, jagged edges.

Which sum of experience didn't make the ascent less vertiginous, chafing, or sweaty. They might have gone the whole way on thrusters, but maneuvering with bulky equipment while moving ever closer to the shield's outer edge was already a risk. One misfire— left for right, right for left— and you'd be off, very briefly and very fatally, to the realm of flame and ash. The image of an old-fashioned Hell stuck in Whitby's mind. Midway, clambering beam to beam, maneuvering the equipment bag from near-snag to near-snag, micro-steering with her suit thrusters, she said:

"God, it's getting hot. Sure you checked the A/C on this suit, Mace?"

Mace grunted as, in unspoken unison, he and Kaneda nudged the coffin clear of a hangup on the gridwork. _Your suit, your maintenance, Whitby. You don't like it, pop your helmet and get yourself some fresh air._

_Quiet, you two, _Kaneda panted. He paused, leaned back, looking up at the wreckage. Whitby looked, too. It was all wrong, she thought. The burst cubist tumble of cabins, the black gashes in the twisted metal. Like looking at a shipwreck from beneath.

Eighteen minutes later, they'd arrived. They tied off the coffin and the equipment bag, tethered themselves to girders at the back of the shield, assessed the scene.

_No obvious damage to the shield, _Kaneda said. _That's good_.

Mace was peering into the space between the wreckage and the overhang of the shield. _Damn, that's a tight fit._

Kaneda joined him. _You could have asked Trey to come in your place._

Mace snorted. _He's nearly as bad in a suit as Capa_.

_Unprofessional, Mace,_ Kaneda said. _Good thing they can't hear you on the flight deck._

_You can always put me on report— _Mace replied. A second's silence on the feed, and then he added, dryly:_ — Captain._

Whitby let them snipe. She was studying the wreckage, mapping it in her mind as she would a ship at the bottom of a sunless sea. Gauging tight spots, possible dead ends, potential escape routes.

The corridor that had connected the cabins and the _Icarus_ had unspooled like a shredded cardboard tube. At least three of the cabins themselves had been ripped wide open. At least two were missing completely. Two more looked to be breached. No bodies or body parts immediately apparent: Whitby was grateful for that. The cabin nearest the edge of the shield looked to be intact, but the door side was facing into the back of the parabola. If they wanted access, they'd have to cut their way in, and then they'd have to work fast: what air might be remaining within would vent very quickly once they'd pierced the hull.

Kaneda chalked on the cabin's hull side a square large enough to accommodate the bulky shoulders of a suit. _Mace, prep the capsule. Whitby, you're going in. Break out the torches._

The arms of the EVA suits contained feeder lines for a variety of equipment. From the equipment bag, Whitby passed cutting torches to Mace and Kaneda, coupled her own torch to her wrist, checked the lights for her oxygen and fuel lines. All green: no leaks. Still, before she fired up, she took a deep, careful breath. Nothing but the flat odor of sweat and canned oh-two. No sweetness. The fuel smelled, some people said, like sugar cookies. Lighting a torch in the presence of a leak could lead to a backspark inside your suit: the mixture of fuel and oxygen would ignite, and you'd be burned alive.

_You good, Whitby?_ Mace asked.

"Good as gold."

_Let's cut,_ Kaneda said.

They each picked a chalked line, started to cut. Sparks popped along the lines as the torches penetrated the hull.

_There's air in there__,_ Mace said. _Get ready, Whitby._

Whitby shut off her torch, unclipped it from her suit, tethered it to the equipment bag. Mace and Kaneda torched the fourth line, quickly, together, and then Mace braced his back against a girder and kicked in the cut segment of hull.

An outrush of debris. Whitby boosted herself through the hole. The light from her helmet revealed tendrils of smoke coiling like snakes in zero g. Two bodies, upper left. Tangled. Blankets, shredded gray chunks of insulation—

A man and a woman, frozen as if in freefall. They were suspended above her, floating on their backs just shy of what had once been the cabin's left-side wall, their bodies imparted motion by the movement of Whitby's light. No time to assess their condition. She grabbed the woman's arm, pulled.

"Kirbuk"— she said.

One body through the hole, into the rescue capsule.

"— and— ah, Christ— it's Pinbacker."

The _ah, Christ,_ the reason: Mace saw a second later, as Whitby passed the second body through. Pinbacker was burned almost beyond recognition. Oxygen fire, coolant fire, electrical fire: he'd gotten himself in the path of an inferno when the accident happened. Mace and Kaneda shoved him into the coffin with Kirbuk, sealed it, activated the pressurization and the heating cells.

One detail registered in Mace's mind before he and Kaneda closed the capsule: the light on Pinbacker's biostats tag glowing blue. He, not Gavrila Kirbuk, was their survivor.

#####

Confirmed, inside, an hour later: Kirbuk was dead. And Pinbacker was dying. Searle informed them bluntly of that fact when the greater part of the remaining crew had gathered in Medical. The captain had third-degree burns over more than seventy percent of his body. What was worse was that he wasn't comatose. Impossible, but true. He'd screamed out a lungful of air when they unsealed the rescue capsule, and he'd continued to scream until Searle injected him with enough sedative and painkiller to floor at least three men Pinbacker's size. Now he was twitching in a chemical slumber while Searle did his best to dress his burns.

At the rear of Medical, outside the tiny room that housed the ship's mortuary freezers, Gavrila Kirbuk was lying on a steel examination table. She was dressed as she normally dressed for bed, in loose lounging pants and a worn black sweatshirt. Her face was very pale, suspensively still, as if she were neither dead nor, more poetically, sleeping, but anticipating something that required her to close her eyes. A splash of water, maybe, or the pouring-on of plaster-of-Paris for a life-mask. Her feet were bare. Mace thought she looked cold. The idea seemed to prick the backs of his eyes. He reached out and brushed the knuckles of his right hand against Kirbuk's cheek. Her skin felt like clay.

Whitby was standing with him, silently. She couldn't bear to be in the room, Mace knew, with Pinbacker suffering as he was; she couldn't bring herself to leave. If Mace had been able to move, he might have touched her. If he weren't so certain that if she started to cry he would cry, too, he might have held her. Too much death for two days. Too fucking much. As it was, he and Whitby were still standing like sentries when Cassie and Capa entered Medical and approached Kirbuk's body.

"No. Oh, no," Capa whispered. Mace saw his eyes fill with tears, saw Cassie squeeze his hand.

"Yeah. Too bad, isn't it?" Mace's voice was low and harsh. He took his eyes from Kirbuk's bluish-white face, fixed them hard on Capa. "Now you've gotta play God all by yourself, don't you?"

"Mace—" Cassie looked at him as sharply as her delicate face would allow, shook her head at him. He met her eyes for just a second, then looked away, turned, and walked out of Medical. Whitby followed him as far as the door, and then Mace heard Searle call her name. Mace didn't look back. He kept walking until he reached the staging area outside the aft airlock. There, mechanically, he finished checking and re-airing his EVA suit. Whitby's, too.

#####

He shouldn't have been lucid, let alone conscious, but he was. Whitby, on Searle's request, remained by Pinbacker's side after all the rest of the crew had left Medical. Barring walked out with Trey, her hand on his shoulder for guidance. Cassie left with Capa, who seemed stunned to the point of incorporeality by the physical fact of Kirbuk's death. After sixteen months sharing ship-space with the boy, Whitby had come to know that he related to his emotions like a body with a mismatched shadow: when the two parts aligned, when he actually felt something, the effect could be practically overwhelming, or, as now, even devastating.

Emotionally, at the moment, Whitby was herself ready to crumble. When Pinbacker looked up at her and said, "Why did you rescue me?", she nearly burst into tears.

"We couldn't leave you out there."

A moment of clarity, granted him by the pain meds. It would last for possibly three minutes. "Did you ever love me, Loinnir?" Pinbacker asked softly.

She couldn't look at him, and she couldn't look away. She bit the inside of her mouth to draw her focus from the sobs bunching in her throat. "I still do, Dan."

"Knife. Not a scalpel. A scalpel might break."

"What—?"

"Are you wearing your boot knife, love?"

"Yes."

He looked in her eyes. His were pleading yet gentle in the raw horror of his face. "Under my jaw," he said. "Both arteries. Cut them."

"I can't do that."

"Please, Loinnir. I'm a waste of oxygen. Searle is burning through the mission supply of meds to keep me—"

"No."

He gazed up at her, and she could see him beginning to lose himself. When he spoke again, it was with more effort. "I did something out there—" He frowned. Frustration as the pain began to slip past the drugs. Frustration, and a terrible fear. His voice dissipated to a dry whisper. "I realized something. The mission is changing—"

He was on the cusp of not knowing her. Whitby no longer tried to hold back her tears. "I don't understand, Dan."

"You will." He focused on her as long as he could. Then his back arched against the cot and he drew a breath that was half a scream. "Oh, God. _God_—"

#####

Whitby couldn't retreat to the cabin she had shared with Cassie. Said cabin was shredded like a rotted cardboard box across the upper edge of the solar shield. Their belongings, like those of everyone else aboard the _Icarus_, were gone. Whitby would receive her share of clothing and toiletries when the surviving members of the crew tallied and allotted the goods remaining in ship's stores, but nothing would replace the picture of Whitby's older brother, Richie, and his wife, Mary, standing on the bleak, beloved beach outside Mulvern, the wind tangling Richie's wild pepper-and-salt hair, a dark-eyed devil's grin on his face, his arm around Mary's shoulders and their big white house perched on the dune-grass bluff behind them. A photo taken by Richie's wayward younger sister before she went wayward all the way to the bloody sun. The knife with which Pinbacker had asked her to kill him was a going-away present from Richard Whitby to his wreck-diver sibling: a CRKT Sting, its sheath chafing Whitby's ankle beneath the shank of her right boot. An irritant, but one to which she was sentimentally connected and the utility of which she understood. By comparison, what drove her to the engine room now bordered on unbearable.

Daniel Pinbacker. She'd known the warmth of his body, his textures and touch, his taste, his scent. She sat now with her back to the hard bulkhead beside the huge gears of the ship's differential and breathed the steely funk of hydraulic fluid and grease, trying to flush from her nostrils the odor, metallic-sweet and horrible, of his burned flesh.

She had her knees pulled up, her head in her hands. She heard Mace say: "Loinnir—?"

"Would you fuck off, Stephen? Please."

"You're in the engine room. I work here."

"Work somewhere else—"

She meant to say more; her voice trailed off. She felt utterly blank. Mace sat down beside her, close enough so that their shoulders touched. He didn't put his arm around her.

"He knows he's dying," she said.

Mace said, tightly, "Hard for him not to."

"I'm going to die, too."

"Did he tell you that?"

"No."

"Then that's the first stupid thing I've ever heard you say."

She didn't reply. He was being brutal but honest; she couldn't fault him for it. Nor did she prompt him for the followup— "I won't let you die, Loinnir." In turn, out of respect, Mace didn't look to see her crying. She pressed her shoulder more tightly to his, and he stayed there beside her. That was all.

#####

An hour or so later, the new captain of the _Icarus_ was feeling too much stillness aboard ship. He finished re-airing and stowing his suit, didn't see Mace or Whitby as he passed through Engineering. The flight deck was empty: Trey wasn't at navs; the ship was flying on auto-pilot.

Voices from the mess. Kaneda entered quietly and stood, he thought, unnoticed just inside the door. They were all there, save for Pinbacker, the people who were now Kaneda's crew, standing or seated around the room's largest table.

Searle was on his feet, leaning against the table with his weight on the hand of his good arm. He was addressing all of them, though he was focusing on Mace. "I can't do that," he was saying. "Without— my God— without at least consulting Earth, I can't euthanize someone."

"I'll do it, then." Whitby was standing across from Searle, to Mace's left. "He's already asked me to—"

"No." Mace's tone was uncharacteristically protective. "You don't want to live with a memory like that, Loinnir."

"So what do we do?" Trey asked. "Take a vote? Draw straws?"

"This is sick," Cassie said. "I won't be a part of it."

She was seated at the table; Capa stood behind her chair, his hand resting on her shoulder. "We don't vote on something like this," he said.

Mace nodded. "For once, I'm siding with Brainiac. This is a command decision—" — with a hard and sudden look at Kaneda— "— _sir_."

Kaneda looked back at him coldly. "Make him as comfortable as you can," he told Searle, and walked out.

#####

Ten minutes later, Kaneda was in the alcove off Comms that acted as the CO's office, paging through screen after screen of stats, solar data, readouts from _Icarus_' internal and external sensors, seeing less than he should and wishing more than he ought that he was still first officer. Searle appeared in his peripherals, rapped at the wall.

"A word, sir?"

"Of course." Kaneda gestured at the chair opposite his, across the alcove's small desk.

Searle flinched as he sat down.

"How's your arm, Tom?"

A tight smile. "It hurts."

"Can't you give yourself something for it?"

"I need to stay focused. And Pinbacker needs the strong stuff more than I do."

He said the man's name. Not "the captain." Kaneda minimized his current windowful of data but didn't look up from the screen of his monitor. "What did you want to discuss?"

"I didn't know if I should tell the others." Searle's voice dropped. He propped his good elbow on the desktop, leaned closer. "I examined Kirbuk—"

"And?"

"Petechiae in both eyes."

"A symptom of vacuum asphyxiation."

"That wasn't all. Her hyoid bone is fractured. There are finger-shaped bruises on her throat." He waited until Kaneda met his eyes. "He strangled her, Akira."

For a second, shock rendered Kaneda mute. "He must have been mad with pain," he said, finally. "Blind. Panicked."

"Or he wanted her air."

"He wouldn't do that. He would never have placed his needs over those of—"

_Captain Kaneda?_

Cassie's voice.

"Yes, Cassidy?"

_Would you join us on the flight deck, sir? We're about to alter course for final approach._

"I'm on my way."

He stood as Searle did. The doctor looked at him questioningly.

"Don't tell the others," Kaneda said.

#####

On the flight deck, Cassie was in the pilot's seat; Kaneda was her acting co-pilot. Trey was at navs, Capa was watching the readouts from the payload, and Sullivan was monitoring life support. Barring was sitting, largely sightless, at comms.

In the ship's main corridor, Mace was positioned aft of the patched sector in the hull; six meters farther along, facing back his way, Whitby was standing ahead of it.

Cassie spoke over their comm links. _New coordinates locked. Changing course now._

For a moment, nothing changed. And then: a groaning in the metal of the infrastructure, a long, deep, grinding shriek. A sound unnatural even by man-made standards. Mace saw the corridor shift before his eyes, he felt the deck twist beneath the soles of his boots, and he shouted, even before _Icarus_ could sound the alarm for imminent structural failure, "Throttle back, Cassie! Power down! Power down—!"

A layer of roar vanished as Cassie cut the main thrusters. A second later, she eased the retros to power, and the groaning died as the ship's motion neutralized. The deck stabilized beneath Mace's feet. He held his breath, listening for the popping of rivets, the cracking of weld, the whistle of air from a hull breach. Twenty feet away, Whitby, one hand pressed gingerly to the patched bulkhead, was doing the same thing.

She looked his way, shook her head. Her expression was grim. "Kaneda—?" Mace said.

_Report, Mace._

"Best guess, sir: if we go to full power long enough to change course, the repairs to the hull won't hold."

Thirty minutes later, his guess was gospel. A scan of the hull showed that the damage to the ship ran deeper than they'd thought. If they tried to turn for their final approach to the sun, the _Icarus_ would snap in two.

#####

#####

"Can we fix it?" Kaneda asked. He and his people were now gathered as a crew on the flight deck. "I need hardly point out that loss of navigational capability at this point would be... problematic."

Trey spoke drolly from the room's upper level: "All in favor of not flying directly into the sun...?" He raised his hand. Several of the others did, too.

Mace looked around at them. "Come on, guys. This was always a possibility."

"Wait, wait: _what_?" Cassie, standing near the cockpit, stared at him incredulously. "Crashing the ship was always a possibility—?"

"Cassie, you knew that—"

"I know I'm just the pilot; I just drive the bus, but—"

"You knew there was a possibility we wouldn't make it back."

"I guess I missed the memo."

"It might not work anyway." Capa stepped clear of the shadows around the science station, focused his too-clear eyes directly on Mace. "The launch is meant to occur within a given range of angles relative to the surface. There's a target zone."

"I know that."

"So why are you so prepared for us to die? It would be pointless and, worse, likely ineffectual."

"If it _were_ effectual, you'd be all for it, though, wouldn't you—?"

Whitby, standing slightly behind Mace just inside the hatchway, saw the muscles tighten in his shoulders. She'd known her share of dangerous men. She brushed past him, drawing his attention away from Capa, and asked, echoing Kaneda: "So: can we fix it?"

"Shoring beams for the shield," Mace said, "welded and riveted to reinforce the hull. We can cut them to fit."

"With Capa's help, I can work out the engineering angles," Trey offered. "Of course— given the delay, the time deviation— the final course adjustment will be more extreme."

"Then we'll have to make sure the repairs are extra-solid," Kaneda said. "Can you work out the corrections?"

"I think _Icarus_ and I can handle it. We can model any changes before we apply them." Trey added, with a bit less brio: "And, um, anyone who cares to is free to check our math."

"I'll break out my slide rule," Whitby muttered. "Don't trust you or that damn box as far as I can throw the both of you."

"We're looking at at least an eight-hour job, with a full team," Mace said. He turned to Capa. "Can we accommodate the delay in launch?"

"The payload has a half-life of roughly five million years," Capa replied. "It's not like the sell-by date is coming up anytime soon."

Blank looks all around. He blushed, drew into himself. "I—I'm sorry—"

"It's okay." Trey leaned toward him conspiratorially. "We've never heard you make a joke before, that's all."

Tentative smiles, from Cassie, from Whitby and Sullivan.

"Come on, people," Kaneda said. "We have a plan. Let's map out the repairs and suit up."

#####

The intention was to complete the repairs all at once, without a break. The work crew would take along extra oh-two tanks, to be bundled and tethered in the construction zone. Each tank was good for an hour; each suit held two tanks. In the staging area at the aft airlock, Kaneda reviewed instructions for the inexperienced on how to swap out an empty. Cassie helped Trey and Capa to suit up. Kaneda was going out first, with Sullivan. Whitby would follow with Trey. Mace and Capa would be last.

"Keep in mind," Kaneda said, as he wrestled his way into his suit, "we still don't have comms between the ship and the suits. Suit-to-suit, yes, but they won't be able to hear us inside. Or vice-versa."

"So no emergency assistance from Medical or the flight deck." Cassie spoke to the room at large, then went back to helping Capa clamp himself into his armored golden exo-self. She leaned a little closer than absolutely necessary, rigging his earpiece and mike. "Mind your air," she said, more quietly, just for him. "Stick close to Mace."

"I will. I want to kiss you," he added. Nerves talking: he was surprised when he said it. He was more surprised a second later when Cassie kissed him on the lips.

"Be careful, Robert," she said. She drew back, her eyes never leaving his, and closed his helmet.

Mace and Whitby would be the fastest to suit up, so they suited up last. They stood apart from the others, savoring a few final moments when their limbs weren't golem-thick and clumsy. Whitby caught Mace watching Capa, his expression flat and cold.

"It's not his fault that Kirbuk is dead," she said, softly. "You know that, right?"

"Of course I know that—" He heard his own tone, caught himself.

"Do you want to partner Trey instead?"

"No."

He was certain. He was capable. But he was shaking. Out of sight of the others, Whitby drew his head down to her shoulder.

"I'm just so fucking tired," he whispered.

"I know, Stephen. I know. Me, too." She closed her eyes, rubbed his back. "But we keep it together, yeah?"

"Yeah." He drew away from her. Not out of embarrassment, though, or out of awkwardness: when he squared his shoulders, Whitby saw at least the ghost of his easy, brash confidence. "C'mon, woman, I'll help you with your chest plate."

"You'll keep your hands well away from my chest plate, you great pervert."

#####

For the first three hours, everything went relatively well. All six of the spacewalkers guided the ten-meter-long beams from the anaerobic construction hold at the far forward end of the ship; Whitby, Trey, and Sullivan cut the lengths into segments with the chemical torches clipped to their left wrists; Mace, Kaneda, and Capa welded and riveted the pieces in place. Capa managed to stay focused and calm within the confines of his suit until, hanging upside-down at the underside of the hull, he happened to look down into the black emptiness stretching off forever beneath his head. A clear open window in the dust cloud surrounding the ship. And through it he could see—

— far off, far, far off, a star. A billion miles away.

Close enough to touch.

With the blackness crowding in all around him.

He drew a breath, pushed it out. The blackness didn't budge. He breathed harder, staring at that single star—

Something nudged his right arm. He turned clumsily with his thrusters, saw a gold-suited figure hanging upside-down next to him.

_Capa?_ Mace's voice spoke inside his helmet: _You okay?_

"Y—yeah."

_You're doing fine, man. Relax._

Capa nodded shakily, blew out hard. A drop of sweat floated before his eyes like a clear glass bead. "Okay."

Mace rapped on his helmet._ Don't go staring at shit. You'll freak yourself out._

He maneuvered away to meet Whitby and Trey, who were approaching with a segment of girder. Capa checked his remaining oxygen and the charge on his rivet gun and followed him.

#####

"My eyes hurt," Barring said. She was on the flight deck with Cassie, sitting in the co-pilot's seat, facing the banks of monitors in the cockpit, the forward windows. Given that ship-to-suit comms were still down, and for all they could see of the work crew through the distance, darkness, and dust— which was to say nearly nothing— she was, despite being some seventy percent blind, practically as cued in as Cassie was to what was going on outside.

"Do you want me to walk you to Medical?" Cassie asked.

"No. Thank you. I can go on my own."

A tip Whitby had imparted en route to the aft airlock with the rest of the work crew. The Hibernian witch had her uses. "Count your steps, Ingrid," she'd said. "Sixty-five short ones from Medical to the flight deck. Another fifty to the aft airlock."

"Is that a hint?" Barring had replied.

She felt Whitby's phantom grip on her shoulder as she pushed back in the co-pilot's seat. A simple response, a squeeze. Bony fingers, strong. Barring would never admit to anyone, especially to Whitby, from this private realm of dark shapes and shadows, with the memory of pain and fear still sharp in her mind, how reassuring that contact had been.

She got up, eased clear of the cockpit. "I'll be right back."

She could feel Cassie watching her. She tried not to resent it. Being solicitous was a central component of their chief pilot's makeup; as even their low-affect backup physicist would be apt to attest, she was the very embodiment of "caring." A veritable trifecta of it: noun, verb, and adjective.

"Call if you need help," Cassie said.

#####

Two cocktails. One for himself, one for Pinbacker.

Just a hint of painkiller, a jolt, an aperitif. His arm was hurting like a bastard. Searle swallowed pills and water, waited, relaxed as the edge, just the edge, of his consciousness softened. He focused. He listened for maybe twenty seconds to Pinbacker's breathing. Listened without looking at the man himself, without consulting the monitors or the holographic rendering of Pinbacker's insides floating in midair beside the captain's cot.

Without looking, he listened to the increase in respiration, the rising strain as Pinbacker forced air in and out of his lungs. The wheeze in his throat as he struggled to breathe. His latest dose of painkiller was giving out. In fifteen minutes, he'd be screaming. He'd been better off where he was, out in the wreckage, in zero g. Alone with his conscience, Searle could admit that. In here, the air burned against Pinbacker's exposed flesh. In here, he was one raw nerve ending.

Searle went to the drugs cabinet, took out three bottles of Lethanol. He unwrapped a syringe, capped it with a needle. He'd wanted to wait until the others were out of the way. This was a decision Kaneda didn't need to make so early in his command; this was something Whitby didn't need to see. By the time the repair crew returned, Daniel Pinbacker would have died. That was all. Searle pierced the rubber cap of the first bottle of painkiller, drew the contents into the syringe. Behind him, Pinbacker groaned. Searle tossed the empty first bottle into the recycler, reached for the second.

"Doctor Searle?"

"Yes—?" Searle placed the syringe, two-thirds full, on the equipment tray to the right of the meds cabinet. He turned. Barring was standing just inside the entrance to Medical, her hand on the doorframe. Uncertainty, a heightened awareness, on her face. Her serge-blue eyes were focused on a point midway into the room.

"Ingrid—? Did you come here by yourself?"

"I'm not an invalid, Searle."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to sound condescending." He approached her. Her eyes tracked his motion without quite finding his face. Searle smiled. "Getting more of your sight back?"

"Yes." She smiled, too, slightly. "But they hurt. My eyes hurt."

"Part of the healing process." He took her by the right arm, guided her closer to the bank of examination lights. "Here: let's have a look."

She stood, coldly patient, while he checked her eyes. Her sclerae were still shot through with red, but her pupils were beginning to respond, and the swelling, both around the sockets and in the eyes themselves, was practically gone. He offered her a pill for her troubles, pressed it into the palm of her right hand. "This might make you a little woozy."

"It's alright, Searle." She waited while he placed a plastic cup of water in her free hand. "It's not like I'm on duty."

Searle watched her drink, took the cup back when she finished. "What do you say to a bit of light therapy?"

"Alright."

She held out her forearm, not her hand, and Searle guided her to the Earth Room.

#####

Outside, near the new scaffolding of girders caging the bulkhead, Capa found himself floating next to Sullivan, on the far end of a beam. Kaneda and Mace were guiding the opposite end. Sullivan was refueling his welding torch.

_Do you smell that—?_ he asked, absently.

An odd question. Capa, of course, could smell nothing but the salt-metallic tang of sweat and canned air. "No. What—?"

_Something sweet. Like vanilla, or_—

Whitby barked, suddenly, over the feed: _Sully, don't—!_

— as Sullivan pressed the power switch for his torch. He screamed.

White-hot light glowed from the viewslot of his helmet. Capa froze, staring.

Inside his suit, Sullivan was on fire.

Mace boosted himself over the far end of the beam, propelled himself their way. _Capa, vent his suit—!_

Sullivan was thrashing, howling. Capa pawed clumsily at him with his heavily gloved hands, couldn't get a grip on the clamp on the man's helmet— "I can't reach the release—"

_Vent his fucking suit—!_ Mace reached them, shoved Capa aside, shut off the airflow on Sullivan's suit, popped his helmet.

The flames extinguished.

And for a second Capa looked directly into Sullivan's empty black eye sockets. "Jesus— Jesus God—"

A second later, Mace had Sullivan's helmet closed and re-sealed. He switched on the man's air a second after that. He held Sullivan by the bulky shoulders of his suit and methodically checked the biostat lights on his chest plate, peered through the view slit of his helmet, past the smoldering horror that was Sullivan's face, and checked the lights there. Red. Nothing but red. No greens, no yellows.

_He's dead,_ Mace announced.

Whitby and Kaneda and Trey had reached them. "I— I'm sorry," Capa stammered.

Mace turned Sullivan's body to face him. _Tell him that_.

_Mace. Christ—_ Whitby got between him and Capa. _It was Sully's fault. He shouldn't have fired his torch. And five seconds is the outer limit for venting a suit. How many times have you managed it—?_

Mace didn't reply.

_Do we take him in? _Trey asked.

Over the feeds, a moment of labored silence, of shared breathing.

_No, _Kaneda replied. _We tether him; we keep working._

#####

He burned. He was sleeping; then he was falling; then he was on fire.

An electrical spark ignited a mixture of oxygen and coolant in Pinbacker's tumbling cabin. He became his own lightsource when the space around him went black. Smoke, flame, flashes of flailing limbs beyond the privacy glass of his door. The door bursting open. Vacuum beyond. Pulling himself into— or being pulled into— Kirbuk's cabin next door. The door sealing. There was air. Air. His relief was so great that for a second he didn't realize that while the flames were gone from his body, the pain wasn't.

It was still with him now.

#####

Maybe, thought Searle, he'd given himself a touch too much. Pinbacker hadn't had nearly enough. In opposition to the uncertainties of spot-titering, Searle was experiencing withdrawal, too: he hadn't been to the forward lounge in days. The sun he saw in his mind was faded, cracked. An artifact from a provincial church, an icon, a piece among dozens on a museum wall. He needed to feel the light flooding his pupils, tingling on his skin, pressing against the vestigial nerve endings of his pineal gland. In the meantime, while he'd managed to drug himself to the point of indecision, the one-time captain of the _Icarus_ was moaning like an animal.

_Searle?_

Cassie's voice.

"Yes, Cassie?"

_Barring was coming to see you. Did she make it there okay?_

"Yes. She's resting in the Earth Room."

_That sound—_

"It's the captain. I have to go, Cassie—"

_Of course—_

The feed went quiet. Pinbacker didn't.

Searle shuddered, hunched his shoulders, both good and bad, aching and not, and fought an urge to put his hands over his ears._ Short of murder, how do I make it stop—?_

"_Icarus_."

_Yes, Doctor Searle?_

"Auto-doc programming: medical code override 'Heller.'"

He waited through five seconds of silence. The mainframe was healthy and online; the request was unorthodox. _Icarus_ was locating files in some seldom-visited corner of her vast database, comparing them to standard operating procedure, and, in her artificial wisdom, deciding whether Searle's request required command authorization.

_Override 'Heller' accepted. Nonstandard procedures programming loading to auto-doc._

Searle breathed out. "Thank you, _Icarus_."

Pinbacker's eyes were more green-gold than brown now, the red in his sclerae diluting the contrast in colors. He went silent as Searle approached; he looked up at the doctor with agonized, wordless pleading. "Relax, Dan," Searle told him. "I'm going to help you." He injected Pinbacker with enough Lethanol to keep him quiet. (If it were too much, though, if it killed him— this, thought Searle, from behind the cotton-like scrim of the painkiller he himself had taken— what did it matter, really?) Pinbacker's scorched lids closed over his eyes; his breathing deepened and slowed. Searle ordered up a scan of the man's central nervous system; _Icarus,_ complying, wove in the air before his eyes a three-dimensional latticework of nerves in bright peacock blue. Searle then told her to map and overlay the intersect points between Pinbacker's primary pain receptors and his brain. Simple, really. Maybe too simple. The hot spots— where the captain's body screamed out its agony to his cerebral cortex— appeared, appropriately enough, in red.

"_Icarus:_ virtual-scalpel interface, real-time. Subject: neurological scan, Daniel Pinbacker."

_Acknowledged, Doctor Searle._

A stylus in Searle's hand, fetched from the instruments cabinet, a laser-tipped telescoping arm above Pinbacker's head.

"Commence test, _Icarus_: stylus-to-laser synchronization."

_Commencing test, Doctor Searle._

Searle shifted his hand to the right, to the left, up and down, through the holographic representation of Pinbacker's nervous system. The telescoping arm moved as the stylus did.

"_Icarus_: magnify scan."

The threadlike nerves before Searle's eyes grew to the thickness of rose stems.

"And again, please, _Icarus_."

A thicket now, a thorn bush in brilliant blue. Searle placed the tip of the stylus at the edge of the virtual first of Pinbacker's primary pain receptors, hanging in the air in front of him like a splatter of blood, and depressed a button on the stylus's side. Above Pinbacker's head, the metal arm replicated the motion of the stylus; the arm's tip glowed red.

And, deep inside the captain's skull, the subcutaneous laser began to cut.

#####

Pinbacker flatlined seconds after Searle severed his last pain receptor.

All for the best, Searle thought, as he terminated the auto-doc program, closed down the holographic projection, put away the stylus. The man suffered enough. Had he survived the procedure, he would have lived the last three days of his life comfortably free of sensation, that was all. Therein lay the enforced obscurity of the Heller programming, the need for the override: to end Pinbacker's pain, Searle had damaged beyond repair the man's interface with physical sensation. The captain of the _Icarus_ would have been paralyzed. He would never have _felt_ anything ever again.

Searle was feeling too much. Regret, yes. A degree of grief, even: their captain had been a decent and brave man, he and Searle had been shipmates for nearly two years, and the tragedy and strain of the last two days had been close to overwhelming. But, more immediately, Searle was feeling what Pinbacker, had he lived, couldn't: the dull but insistent ache of his broken arm.

He took from the meds cabinet a white pill, swallowed it. Not to be confused with the pill he'd given Barring, no: what he took would focus on the pain, on further defanging the bite of his fracture's grating edges. Barring's pill, very likely, had gone straight for her consciousness. Which was fine: her healing body needed the sleep. Searle re-capped the pill bottle, shut the bottle behind the glass doors of the meds cabinet, and turned to go to the Earth Room.

He stopped, shocked. His heart thumped up against the base of his throat.

Pinbacker was sitting up on his cot.

Rigor mortis could do that, Searle reminded himself. Corpses laid out flat on their backs had, on occasion, been known to bend at the waist: with the body no longer producing adenosine triphosphate, the muscles, including those in the abdomen and back, continued to contract, pulling the torso upright. Only the phenomenon normally took hours—

Pinbacker turned to him and asked: "What have you done to me, Tom?"

Searle stood mutely looking at the readouts on the biostats monitor. Seeing the alpine march of Pinbacker's heartbeat across the screen. Wondering which pill he had in fact taken, or how many pills in total.

"Captain—" He had to fight not to stammer. "How do you feel?"

It was a stupid question. A God-damned incompetent's question. Pinbacker's burned lips twisted into a smile.

"That's the thing, Tom: I don't feel anything at all."

"You shouldn't be able to move."

He didn't mean to say it out loud. It was as if the meds spoke for him. That one white pill.

"Really—?" Pinbacker replied. Searle stared in disbelief as the man swung his legs off the cot. Casually, Pinbacker pulled the IV needles from his forearms. He watched blood trickle across the raw flesh of his wrists and drip onto the floor. He held one of the needles carefully between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and studied its gleaming bloodstained length. "Might I have a glass of water?"

"Of course."

They were both in shock. Searle told himself that as he half-filled a plastic cup with water at the tap to the right of the equipment cabinet. He was also suddenly, acutely aware that, save for a blind woman who was likely drugged unconscious in the next room, he and Pinbacker were alone in Medical.

As if he could hear Searle's thoughts, Pinbacker asked: "How many of the crew survived?"

"Nine."

Searle handed him the water. Pinbacker watched his own fingers curl around the cup.

"And how many are on board now?"

He drank while he waited for Searle to reply. Searle said nothing.

"Ah," Pinbacker murmured. He looked thoughtfully at the cup. "You see, I can remember being able to feel. I remember _feeling_. The sensations are still there."

"Like a phantom limb..."

"A phantom limb: yes. Like my body is one big phantom limb."

"You should lie back down, Dan. You need to rest."

"I'll rest later. I need to show you something," Pinbacker said. "There's something you need to understand—"

The frame of the cot creaked as he stood up. Searle felt as if he were trying to wake from a nightmare. That was it: he'd accidentally taken the same medicine he'd given Barring. He hadn't slept much in the last few days, and he was asleep and dreaming now. He was high on painkiller, talking to a dead man. If only the throbbing in his arm weren't so insistent. If only he couldn't feel the deck unsteady beneath his feet, the sweat beading and clammy on his forehead. "What's that, Dan?"

"It would be easier for me to show you. Come with me, Tom."

Something in Pinbacker's tone— so easy and calm, so reasonable— was, drug-dream or no, frightening him. Searle edged toward the tray on which lay the hypo two-thirds full of Lethanol.

He spoke as he moved, kept his voice even. "You need to stay here, Dan. You're weak—"

"I'm strong. Stronger than you think."

Searle looked toward the tray, fumbling. When he turned back, hypo in hand, Pinbacker was right there. He shook his head. "No, Tom."

He held a scalpel. He gripped Searle by the wrist of the hand that held the hypo and jammed the blade of the scalpel into Searle's throat.

#####

Barring was seated on the floor of the Earth Room half asleep— "woozy" having been something of an understatement on Searle's part— when the light program suddenly terminated. Darkness like crude oil flooded her eyes.

From beyond the wall of the Earth Room came a choking, a gurgling. A clatter of metal on the hard deck. A thud.

"Doctor Searle—?"

Barring got up, and a wave of dizziness rose up to meet her. She had to wait, wait longer, before she could move without tipping. And then she one-quarter saw, three-quarters sensed—

A shadow, very near. The smell of burned flesh filled her nostrils.

Mere inches from her right ear, Captain Pinbacker's voice whispered: "Are you an angel?"

Barring, terrified, whispered back: "Yes."

"Then you know where I'm taking him."

The shadow left her. From Medical came the sound of a body being dragged away, a grunting, a groan of shock or pain, the hiss of clothing against the deck. Heavy footsteps, growing distant. Barring waited, frozen in half-drugged fear, until the footsteps and the dragging sound were gone. Then she felt her way to the entrance to Medical. The toe of her right boot caught the edge of a fallen steel tray, sent it slithering away across the deck. Near the door, she slipped on something slick, almost fell. Her flailing right hand found the doorframe; there, she felt something sticky and warm.

Blood. She couldn't see it, didn't dare to taste or smell it, and she knew what it was. Tears filled her useless eyes. She stepped out into the corridor on shaking legs.

And there she realized she'd lost the count.

She was too frightened, too numbed with meds, and she couldn't remember what Whitby had told her: the number of steps that would take her to the flight deck.

#####

Pinbacker moved quickly, with an easy, unfeeling strength. He told Searle, as he dragged the dying man toward the payload, "I want you to know what it feels like. I want you to understand why it has to end."

No time at all, beyond the constraints of sensation, to walk the spindle-length of corridor, to cross young Doctor Capa's cathedral, to navigate the gantries and hallway leading to the forefront of the payload. He propelled Searle those final steps into the lounge, released him. Searle stumbled to his knees, folded forward, gasping, gagging on blood. Pinbacker continued to the window, tipped his forehead to the water-smooth glass, the coolness he couldn't feel. "Now, we have to ask ourselves, Tom, we have to ask: has Akira altered the overrides—?" He spoke as much to Searle as to the sun, the behemoth majesty seething nearly wall-wide before him, the blinding light filtered to ancient gold and arterial red through the computer-controlled tinting.

Behind him, Searle found breath enough to say—

#####

_— Cassie—?_

Searle's voice, over the feed from the comm tags. A cracked and choked whisper. Cassie started, sat up straighter in the pilot's seat.

"Searle—?" It sounded almost as if the interior feeds were failing again. "Is something wrong?"

#####

Pinbacker turned away from the sun. "_Icarus_?"

_Yes, Captain Pinbacker?_

He left Searle where he was, left the lounge. Just outside the door, he stopped.

#####

_— it's Pinbacker, _Searle gasped._ Cassie, he—_

_#####_

"Window filter, forward lounge," Pinbacker said. "Full sunlight, _Icarus_, if you please."

#####

On the flight deck—

— a scream. A most horrible scream. It crescendoed abruptly to a roar, died in a burst of static. Cassie sat bolt upright, her heart suddenly pounding.

"Doctor Searle?"

No reply from the feed. She went to the entrance to the flight deck, looked out into the corridor.

_Cassie_. A different whisper from the feed. _Help me_.

Barring. Cassie left the flight deck, ran for Medical. Barring was standing, her shoulder pressed to the bulkhead, not far from the entrance. She was feeling her way along the corridor.

"Ingrid—?"

Barring's expression was a mix of relief and terror. She reached blindly in the direction of Cassie's voice; Cassie caught her right hand.

Recoiled.

Barring's fingers were covered in blood.

A dark figure, tall, male, was approaching, at a distance, from the direction of the payload. "Searle—?" Cassie called.

"No, Cassie, no. It's not Searle—" Barring spoke desperately. "It's Pinbacker. He—"

Cassie frowned. "It can't be—"

The figure was moving toward them with purpose. In the dimness of the corridor, Cassie still couldn't see its face.

"Cassie—" Barring pulled at her. "Cassie, please—"

Too much shadow, still, but her instincts told Cassie what her eyes couldn't or wouldn't: something was wrong, very wrong, with the man coming their way. She took Barring by the wrist. "Ingrid, run—!"

#####

She and Barring ran for the flight deck, got inside. Cassie closed and locked the hatch.

Waited. Staring at the smoke-gray alloy of the door, her heart thudding against her sternum.

"Cassie."

A man's voice. Pinbacker's voice. Not over her comm feed. Inches away, on the other side of the hatch.

"Cassie, open the door, please."

Beside her, Barring was biting her lip, stifling a sob.

"No, sir," Cassie replied. She was shaking. "Respectfully— Captain, you're not well—"

A pause. Silence.

Something struck a ringing blow against far side of the hatch. Cassie jumped; Barring cried out.

"Lieutenant Cassidy," said Pinbacker, "I'm ordering you to open this door—"

Another thunderous blow to the door. Almost as if someone were hitting it with a four-foot engine wrench. Cassie could swear she saw the hatch shift on its hinges, dent slightly inward.

"Cassie." Pinbacker's voice was quiet now, reasonable, practically gentle. "I would like for you and Barring to join Doctor Searle in the forward lounge. I need you to understand something."

Cassie asked, as evenly as she could: "Understand what, sir?"

"Why it has to end. Why it all has to end."

#####

#####

#####


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** Well, heck, this is turning into what this humble writer cryptically terms a _character-building experience_. Here, now, for your edification and amusement: action, cold temperatures, hot tempers, technobabble, gore, and dubious drug references. About covers it. At a guesstimate, this is the penultimate chapter, folks. The end is in sight. Thanks for reading!

**#####**

**#####**

To the best of the ability of people who weren't shipwrights or structural engineers, the repairs to the _Icarus' _weakened hull were complete. Exhausted, Kaneda and his team returned to the aft airlock. Kaneda was the last one in. He unclipped and pulled off his plated gloves; he unsealed his suit at the sternum and backed into one of the assist stations. As the hooks lifted away his helmet and chest plate, he took a deep breath of air fresh by comparison to what he'd been breathing for the better part of a shift and said, wearily:

"Doctor Searle, we need you at the aft airlock, please."

No response.

"Damn it," Mace said, already half-unsuited, from across the staging area.

"The feed from the comm tags might be down again," Trey offered. He was seated, panting, on one of the area's benches across from Kaneda, his space-armor off, his black bangs matted with sweat.

Mace stepped clear of his suit and went to the wall comm. "_Icarus_, where the hell is Doctor Searle?"

_Doctor Searle is in the forward lounge, Mace._

Whitby glanced over from where she was, hunkered down near Sullivan where he lay on the deck. She was working to get him out of his suit. "Searle, you useless bastard," she muttered.

Kaneda gave her a sharp look as he joined Mace at the wall comm. "Searle, report immediately to the aft airlock."

From the second assist station, waiting for the hooks and the hydraulic lifters to dismantle his suit, Capa was watching the entrance to the staging area, the passageway leading back toward the ship's main corridor. Anyone on the flight deck would have heard the chatter on the public feed. "Mace, shouldn't Cassie be here?"

Mace rolled his eyes. "Cassie, we're back inside. If you've got a minute, Capa needs help getting undressed."

Again: no response.

"Cassie, respond, please."

Behind him, Capa was struggling out of his suit like a man trying to extricate himself from a straitjacket that was half Sherman tank.

"Cassie—"

Capa was free. Out of the corner of his eye, Mace saw him stumble when he stepped onto the deck, his legs not yet readjusted to gravity, to movement without the suit's bulk and heft. His gray t-shirt was soaked with sweat, like everyone else's, front and back. He passed Mace and Kaneda and left the staging area, heading toward the flight deck.

Kaneda took a towel from his suit locker, wiped his face. "_Icarus_, why are Doctor Searle and Lieutenant Cassidy not responding?"

_Doctor Searle is incapable of responding, Kaneda_.

"Why, _Icarus_?"

_Doctor Searle's biofunctions terminated forty-eight minutes ago. The link between the ship's mainframe and the crew's comm tags was terminated manually thirty-five minutes ago. The communications link between the ship's mainframe and the flight deck was terminated manually thirty-four minutes ago._

Shock jolted through the collective exhaustion in the staging area. Whitby joined Mace and Kaneda at the comm. "Terminated by who, _Icarus_—?"

_Unknown, Whitby_.

Mace looked toward the main corridor. Capa was long gone. "Shit—"

He ran for the flight deck. Whitby, Kaneda, and Trey followed him.

**#####**

Just as he reached the flight deck, Capa thought he saw a human figure step through the pockets of shadow in the corridor ahead.

"Searle—?" he called.

The figure paused. Capa couldn't see its face. Its head turned his way, and he could feel it watching him. Without replying, it turned away and continued forward along the corridor, toward the Oxygen Garden and Medical.

Capa frowned. A shiver that he couldn't entirely attribute to the chill of evaporating sweat rippled up his spine. He turned to the entrance to the flight deck. To his surprise, the gangway was closed.

The heavy alloy door was locked.

Moreover, it was dented and smeared with blood.

"Cassie—?" Adrenaline nearly punched the air from Capa's lungs. He pounded at the door. "Cassie, are you in there—?"

From inside, muffled: "Capa—?"

"Cass, what's going—"

The door opened. Capa stepped aside as it swung back on its heavy hinges. Cassie pulled him inside, tugged the hatch closed after him, and recoded the lock. Barring was with her. Both of them looked terrified.

"He's alive," Cassie said. "He's up. He's moving—"

"Who's alive—?"

Cassie's dark eyes were brimming with tears. Capa cautiously touched her cheek; she tentatively touched his chest. She moved nearer, and, sweaty t-shirt or no, he put his arms around her.

"You're safe," she whispered. She held on to him tightly. "Thank God, you're safe—"

Capa asked, more gently: "Who's alive, Cass—?"

"Pinbacker," Barring said. Her voice was flat. "Searle is dead."

A banging at the door. The three of them jumped. "Capa, damn it—!" Mace shouted from the other side. "If you're in there, open up!"

The door opened to an announcement from a breathless Trey: "Searle is dead."

"I already said that," Barring muttered.

Cassie surveyed the newcomers. "Where's Sullivan—?"

"He's dead," Kaneda replied.

"Oh, my God— How—"

"Suit fire," Mace replied, watching Capa re-close the door. "Brainiac stood by and let him burn up."

Capa flinched as he turned to rejoin the group; he wouldn't meet Mace's eyes. "By Christ, Mace," Whitby growled, "I will box your fucking ears."

Mace opened his mouth to respond—

"Lieutenants. _Both_ of you," Kaneda snapped. "Ingrid, Cassie: Pinbacker is mobile?"

"Yes." Barring spoke. "He killed Searle; he left Medical with Searle's body— I think. He asked me if I was an angel; he said I would know where he was taking Searle. I—I didn't know what he meant—"

Mace stopped just short of a snort. "What did he give you? Searle. Did he give you anything for your eyes—?"

"Yes: he gave me something. Yes: I was afraid. I still am. You think that makes me delusional—?"

"I never said—"

"Fuck you, Mace."

"I heard him, too," Cassie says. "He chased us here—"

Kaneda interrupted: "You heard a voice through three inches of heavy alloy. Might it not have been Searle? There's a problem with the comm tags; perhaps _Icarus _misidentified—"

"With all due respect, sir, I should know Captain Pinbacker's voice."

Her tone was harsh enough to pre-empt argument. She looked at Kaneda expectantly. The others did, too.

"We need to find them," Kaneda said, finally.

**#####**

Cassie and Barring remained on the flight deck, behind the re-locked door, guarding the helm. In Medical, Kaneda and the others found only scattered instruments, broken glass, and blood. Trey was the one to think to check the log on the auto-doc.

He was also the first to comprehend what the Heller program meant for Pinbacker— and how it traversed the line between conventional and ethical medical procedure.

"The neurological damage is irreversible." He scowled as he read the transcript and medical coding scrolling up the monitor on Searle's desk. "Basically, he's like someone on PCP. We hit him, he doesn't feel it. And his strength is amped about two hundred percent because he can't hear the limitational cues from his own body."

"PCP—?" Whitby asked.

"Animal tranquilizer," Trey said. "Has the opposite effect on humans. Popular in the late twentieth, early twenty-first century."

Mace leaned in for a closer look at the log. "And you know that how, Trey?"

"I was a hacker in a former life. We have an intimate working knowledge of stimulants."

"If he is mobile, and if he is mentally unstable, why not just lock us out?" Kaneda asked. "He might have sealed the airlock and simply waited for us to run out of oh-two."

"Maybe he's still at the planning stage," Mace offered. "Maybe he doesn't quite have his shit together."

"He's always been one to preserve his human resources," Whitby said, softly.

"Meaning—?" Trey asked.

"He's a compassionate man. On top of that, he's a pragmatic leader. There's a cost to losing qualified personnel. Whatever his goal is, he might be trying to achieve it with a minimum of casualties."

"That makes no damn sense," Mace said.

"He's basically a walking corpse," Capa countered. "He's just been subjected to what amounts to experimental neurosurgery. His judgment is very likely impaired."

"Impaired judgment. So speaks Doctor Asperger."

"Shut up, Mace," Whitby said, wearily.

"Maybe he's afraid to attack us in a group," Trey offered.

Whitby shook her head at him. "He's not afraid of us. He's planning something."

"What?" Mace asked her.

"When I can read his fucking mind, I'll let you know, won't I—?"

"He killed Kirbuk," Kaneda said. He waited through the long moment of stunned silence that followed. "He's capable of, and willing to commit, murder."

"Not willing," Whitby said. "I won't believe that."

Kaneda looked at her coldly. "Consider yourselves warned: the man is dangerous." To her, and to the others, he announced: "We'll split into teams; we'll find him and Searle."

**#####**

Kaneda and Capa were to move forward; Whitby and Mace were heading from midships aft. They armed themselves with tools from midships storage. Mace and Kaneda took meter-long hooked pry bars. Whitby had an EVA grappling hook and her boot knife. Capa looked uncertainly at the two-foot-long crescent wrench in his hands.

"What do we do with Captain— with Pinbacker, once we find him?" he asked.

"Ask him to to submit to chemical and-or physical restraints in Medical," Kaneda replied.

"And if he refuses—?"

"You hit him before he hits you," Mace said. "You hit him, and you keep hitting him, until he goes down and stays down." He looked to Kaneda. "Right—?"

Kaneda frowned. "Right." He turned to Trey. "See if you can get our internal comms restored, Trey."

"From Comms or from the flight deck?"

"Coward," Mace said.

"Yes, I am."

"From the flight deck," Kaneda said.

"Thank you, sir." Trey glared at the wall behind Mace; without another word, he went to join Cassie and Barring.

**#####**

Through forward storage, the forward airlock: nothing. Kaneda and Capa entered the payload via the public gangway. They found blood on the floor of the entryway, on deck of the electric lift, splashed in sticky drops along the catwalk leading back to the forward lounge. The silence of the great gray space seemed that much heavier, pressed in on Capa almost like the blackness beyond the bulkheads, against the counter-pounding of his heart. He could hear himself breathing almost as if he were still in his EVA suit, even as the space around them swallowed the sound of his footsteps and Kaneda's.

They entered the hallway running parallel to the forward lounge. To the wall ahead of them, angled back from the lounge doorway, a wedge of white glare had branded itself. Bits of ash floated between the light and the surrounding shadow. Capa suddenly found himself fighting an urge to gag. "What's that smell—?"

Kaneda went to the wall comm to the left of the lounge entrance. "_Icarus_, window at forward lounge: filter to, and lock filter at, sixty percent."

_Yes, Kaneda._

The light from the lounge dimmed. The triangle-shaped brand remained, smoldering, on the wall. Kaneda looked cautiously into the lounge. Capa joined him. The air was thick with ash and smoke, the smell of burned carpeting and plastic. And something else, like badly charred meat.

Before the wall-wide window, the dimmed red-black fury of the sun, lay the burned remains of a human body. Capa, staring, took a step forward. The sole of his tennis shoe sizzled on the deck. Kaneda pulled him back.

"Searle," he said.

Before Capa could react, a man's voice said, from no more than ten feet away: "It was all he ever wanted, wasn't it—?"

Kaneda brought his pry bar to chest level, placed himself between Capa and his former captain.

Who continued, quietly, as he advanced: "— to know what it felt like to be consumed by the flame—?"

Like magic, a trick of the smoke or the light. Capa couldn't see where Pinbacker might have hidden himself. He seemed to manifest from the shadow at the end of the hall.

"Are you so afraid, Akira?" Pinbacker nodded toward the pry bar. He approached them casually. Kaneda and Capa backed away. "Were you planning to fight me with that? It's too clumsy to be an efficient weapon, and you know it."

"Come along peacefully, Daniel, and there will be no need to fight."

"Very well. A dying man should know when he's beaten."

He followed them out onto the catwalk, and the three of them began the long trek back to the payload entrance. Captors and captive kept their distance. When they reached the junction where the catwalk split toward the control room and the public gangway, Capa was possibly fifteen feet farther ahead of the other two. At the widening of the juncture, Kaneda, tired of walking backward, possibly lulled by the placidity of his charge, maybe out of simple weariness, stepped aside to let Pinbacker pass.

Capa, glancing back at them, saw something glint in Pinbacker's right hand.

"Kaneda, look out—"

For the rest of his life, he would wonder whether he would have been wiser not to shout when he did. Kaneda was only slightly startled, if at all, but it was enough. He brought the pry bar around in a block a second too late. With the scalpel he held in his right hand (Capa could have sworn the man was holding nothing when they left the hallway to the forward lounge— a most horrible thought, and one coming far too late now: he'd had the scalpel concealed _beneath the skin of his forearm_), Pinbacker punched him, a quick series of blows, one, two, three, to both sides of his neck and the base of his throat. Both arteries and the trachea. With his left arm, he knocked the bar aside when Kaneda swung it. Capa thought he heard a crunch of bone. Pinbacker barely flinched.

"You should have brought a knife, Akira."

It took only seconds. Blood was spurting from Kaneda's neck. He windmilled the pry bar, swung the razor-wedge hooked end at Pinbacker's gut. Pinbacker sidestepped. He caught Kaneda from behind, by the shoulders, and slammed his chin into the upper bar of the guard rail. A grisly crack. Kaneda crumpled to the catwalk.

"It's still my command, First Officer Kaneda," Pinbacker said. He picked up the pry bar, straightened, and looked toward Capa.

Who in that second regained his mobility. Whose body at that moment chose poorly between "fight" and "flight" and decided to charge the burned monster on the catwalk, that engine wrench swung back shoulder-high like a claymore or a baseball bat.

Pinbacker punched him in the stomach with the blunt end of the pry bar. He brought the hooked end around and down and pulled Capa's feet out from under him. Capa went sprawling. The wrench left his hands and spun off into the air past the railing of the catwalk. The back of his head hit the guard rail; stars sparked behind his eyes. He heard a distant clatter as the wrench landed in the payload.

**#####**

She was too newly blind, and far too bitter a pragmatist, to believe any nonsense about loss of sight sharpening one's other senses, but Barring, stationed near the wall comm on the flight deck, could swear her left leg was now longer than her right. "Are we listing—?" she asked.

Before Cassie could respond, Trey called from the comms station on the upper deck: "Cassie, I've got a bank of black screens here."

As he spoke, the U-bank of monitors around the cockpit went blank. Cassie for a moment stared at the screens, feeling as blind as Barring. In her right hand, the ship's joystick suddenly locked in place.

"Going to emergency power," she heard herself say. Her hands uncovered and flipped switches. "Autopilot is down. Losing pitch and yaw. Switching to manual."

Two joysticks, bolted in place by hand. Two pedals, swung out and locked. Rudimentary assistance from hydraulics and from the ship's low-level navigational system. A combination of not inconsiderable physical effort to follow, if she was to control the ship. That, and skill, and a certain amount of prayer.

"_Icarus_, inform Captain Kaneda— damn it. Trey, do we have an auxiliary feed? Can we call out—?"

"Yes."

"Barring: inform Captain Kaneda that we're losing primary systems. Helm and communications are failing—"

Trey descended from the upper level, went to navigation. "Top-level navs are down, too. Bringing up feeds from base-level sensors—" He paused, sniffing, frowning. "Is it just me, or is the air going stale—?"

He looked, as Cassie did, to see the row of red lights at life support. Trey left navs, went for a closer look.

"We're losing atmosphere," he said. "Oxygen is venting from the garden directly into space."

"Barring," Cassie said, "inform the crew at large: core mainframe shutdown. Repeat: we are experiencing a core mainframe shutdown."

**#####**

"Jesus," Whitby whispered. "How'd he do it—?"

She and Mace had searched the Oxygen Garden and the physicists' office. They'd checked midships storage, stopped again in Medical and the Earth Room.

Now they found the ship's mainframe hanging like a crucified man a meter above its tank of coolant.

On cue, Barring's voice spoke from the wall comm: _To all crew: we are experiencing a core mainframe shutdown. Repeat: we are experiencing—_

The comm went dead. Whitby found she was holding her breath. Or she thought she was: the air was growing heavy. Her lungs were working harder to draw it in, push it out. She stood beside Mace, both of them watching the coolant drip from the exposed mainframe.

"Fuck," Mace said. "Fucking bastard." He stepped onto the ladder leading to the gantry above the coolant, started to climb. Whitby started, moved, grabbed him.

"What the hell are you doing?"

"We have to get it submersed."

"Without a suit? Are you insane, Stephen—?" She held onto him, back of shirt, muscled upper arm, until he came back down. "If it's been high and dry for more than five minutes— and it obviously has— the fucker's cooked."

"Then we have to swap it out."

"Yeah, we do. With the proper equipment. In suits."

By chance or intention, the safe containing the spare parts for the mainframe stood unbreached at the rear of the parts locker. Perhaps Pinbacker hadn't had time to crack the passcode, known only to Mace and Cho; perhaps, in his madness, he'd overlooked the safe entirely. When Whitby found the environmental suits intended for work in the coolant tank, she knew how clearly he'd been thinking.

Up the arms and legs, across the chests and backs, the suits, all four of them, had been slashed through.

"Looks like it's gonna get cold," Mace said. He took the second-best suit for himself, offered to Whitby the one that looked least damaged.

"Gloves and goggles." Whitby zipped herself up. "At least he didn't get those."

"What do you think? Ninety-second shifts?"

"Yeah. You can't take it, you tell me. I've got more cold-water experience than you."

Mace checked his tool belt. "Thought you were going to tell me you've got more body fat than I do."

"The only one on board who has _less_ body fat than you, Stephen, is Capa, and the boy's a bloody skeleton."

Mace looked at her, met her eyes. Looked as though he might reply. Then he took her by the jaw and kissed her, open-mouthed. Whitby kissed him back, stunned but not too stunned to respond, her hands going to his sides.

"While I can still feel my lips," Mace said, when they parted.

"Likewise. Don't bend the pins," Whitby added. Mace climbed the ladder to the gantry, and she handed him up the first of the parts they would need to swap out. She was shaking.

She hoped he couldn't tell.

**#####**

A gift from the ship's designers: replacing the mainframe was a relatively simple process, as far as computer repairs went:

Unbolting the frame holding the damaged components. Detaching the data couplers without damaging the pin slots. Swapping in new frames, new couplers, without damaging any of ten dozen wire-thin pins, said pins being a seemingly undying holdover from the data cables of the first PCs, a century back. Then waiting to see if the new equipment and the old system would be on speaking terms. _Icarus_ had her own secretive procedures in case of emergency: at the moment of catastrophic system failure, she locked away her core functions in localized redundancies as best she could. Getting her to trust her replaced components was the trick. Not unlike a body accepting or rejecting a new organ, or an amputee doubting the strength of a prosthetic.

A simple process up to that hold-your-breath waiting point, yes, with the proper equipment. At their most-intact best, the worksuits were intended for full immersion lasting no more than ten minutes. Human flesh could withstand exposure of no more than thirty seconds before hypothermia began to set in. Much to Mace and Whitby's credit, the repairs took a mere sixteen minutes.

Five ninety-second exposures to the coolant apiece.

**#####**

He was stronger than she was. Simple fact. He dragged her from the coolant when she couldn't find the strength to drag herself. She lay beside him on the gantry, both their bodies spasming with cold. Pain shook from her lower spine on out. She could feel the ice encrusting her face.

"Look—" Mace panted.

Whitby heard a crackling as she turned her head. To their left and down, lights were flickering from red to yellow to green on the mainframe monitoring panel. They'd done it. The bastard was fixed. Now she and Mace could have a rest. A well-earned pause. Just a minute or so, even thirty seconds, eyes closed—

"No. Fuck—" This was how it happened. Freezing to death. _First chill, then stupor, then the letting go,_ as someone— who was it? Some bloody American, some monosyllabic bloody spinster, decades ago— once said. Great pain and formal feelings—

Whitby forced herself to sit up. The ice pulled her back; she felt the suit rip from her shoulders, a snapping of icicles from her hair, from her joints. "St-stephen, c-come on—"

He didn't respond. He was looking up at the shadows on the ceiling. In the light from the coolant tank, his eyes were a perfect sapphire blue.

Whitby couldn't see his chest moving. Despite the chill of the air and his body, she couldn't see his breath.

"You bastard. You great— No. _No_—"

She slapped him, hard. She bunched the fingers of her frozen right hand into a fist and punched him in the jaw.

"Wha-" Mace coughed, shuddered, glared at her. "What the f-fuck—"

"I said _come on_."

She dragged herself to the ladder, climbed halfway down, fell the rest of the way. She pulled Mace down after her.

"You stand, Mace. You stand up. I can't carry you the whole way—"

They had maybe two and a half legs between them. The coolant on their skin was still doing its work: the frost was still spreading down, deeper, into their muscles. Whitby pulled Mace as he pulled her, toward the door to the mainframe room. On the far side, she stopped, and, by necessity, he did, too. Together they shut the hatch; with impossibly shaking fingers, Whitby entered a lock code.

"I-if you forget," she stammered, "it's my last wreck. The c-coordinates. Richie'll know."

"G-got it."

They passed the flight deck without calling for help. They reached the showers at a crawl. Those extra percentage points of body fat, that extra experience in the hell of cold water: Whitby dragged herself and Mace into a stall, reached up, twisted the tap handle.

She held him; she rubbed his shoulders and torso as the water rinsed away the coolant. He did the same for her. They were still shaking too hard to stand.

"I'll give you a proper warm-up later, Mace, I swear I will—"

"I— I might hold you to that."

"You'd better."

Mace staggered to his feet, offered her a hand up. Whitby took it. They stood a minute longer in the spray, still shivering, still exhausted, but no longer dying.

"Let's check in at the flight deck," he said.

**#####**

A slow quiet chiming. A ringing of metal on metal, an echo of same.

"Do you know what our mission is, Robert?" Pinbacker asked softly.

Capa opened his eyes. He was lying on his back on the catwalk. He'd blacked out for seconds, maybe. It couldn't have been more than that. Two meters from the soles of his shoes, Pinbacker was settled, relaxed, on his haunches. He had the pry bar in his right hand, and he was tapping the blunt end absently against the guard rail; the bell-like echo drifted off into the payload.

"To restabilize the atomic reaction that powers the sun." Capa pulled himself up until he was half-sitting. Beyond that point lay dizziness. "To save the world."

"You're thinking of your own life," Pinbacker said. "Your career and research. Possibly the family you'd have with Lieutenant Cassidy. You have to look further than that."

"What could there be beyond saving all life on Earth?"

"The end of suffering, for humanity and all living things, everywhere."

Capa slowly drew away. "Who told you this, sir—?"

"God. It must have been— He's shown me: it starts with me. I'm dying, but He's taken away my pain." He unfolded his legs, stood. For a moment, he looked away; he closed his eyes, drew a deep, slow breath, sighed it out into the stillness. "Angels came for me. Golden angels of the sun—"

Cautiously, Capa got to his knees, braced himself to rise. "That was Kaneda and Whitby and Mace, sir."

"Of course." Pinbacker opened his eyes. "In the end, Robert— I'm sorry: this is difficult. I've come to think of you almost as a son. What I'm trying to say is this: your services, for purposes of this mission, are no longer required."

He moved too quickly. For his size, for the awful damage to his body. He swung the pry bar up, brought the hooked end slashing down toward Capa's chest.

Capa rolled off the catwalk. Caught the sharp metal edge with his fingertips— thought, in a second: _roughly a six-meter drop; legs: relax, relax, Jesus, relax the knees_-— let go, and fell.

A shock, ribs compressing lungs, as he hit the deck of the payload. A sharp twinge of pain from his left ankle. The inner door of the payload control room was at a diagonal from where he was, maybe thirty meters away. From the catwalk, straight on, a turn to the right, and then down the stairs, it was roughly fifty. Capa rolled to his feet and ran for the door.

From behind and and above him, he heard the sound of running footsteps on the catwalk. Then nothing, then a grunt of landing, and then the footsteps were running directly behind him.

**#####**

He reached the door to the control room. Coded the lock. Opened the door, slipped inside, shut it.

Five digits in to the eight-digit code, the pry bar rang against the door's far side. Capa thought he saw the door itself buck on its hinges. He punched in the last three digits and crossed the control room to the door leading back to the ship. Another blow to the far side of the inner door. Capa got himself back aboard the _Icarus_. He locked the control room's shipside door, and he ran for the flight deck without looking back.

**#####**

"You goddamn coward," Mace said. He and Whitby were soaking wet and shivering and nearly as stoked on adrenaline as Capa was. They'd saved the ship from mainframe failure; they'd nearly frozen themselves in the process; and Cassie and Barring and Trey were hanging back, regarding them with a sort of fear-tinged awe.

"I tried to hit him," Capa said. He was still catching his breath. "He was too fast—"

"You left Kaneda to die."

"He was dead already."

"You just stood there and let Pinbacker kill him."

"Like you care."

Mace hooked his right fist at Capa's jaw. Capa sidestepped it. He caught Mace's wrist, bent his arm up behind his back, and shoved him face-first into the nearest bulkhead. Mace twisted in his grip, snarling in surprise and pain—

"I'll break it," Capa hissed at him, wrenching his arm. "I've had enough. I'll fucking break it—"

"I'll kill you. You fucking bastard—"

No one moved to intervene.

"We really don't have time for this, Mace," Trey said. "Later. You can kill Capa— hell, you can kill _me_— later. Just wait until we do what we came to do."

"I'll do that. I'll kill him. Don't think I won't."

But Mace's expression was less filled with anger, his body less tense.

"Are you boys quite finished?" Whitby asked.

Capa looked at her, looked back at Mace, held on.

"Let him go, Robert," Cassie said quietly. "Mace, don't you touch him."

Capa released him. Mace rubbed his twisted arm. They took a mutual, wary step away from each other.

"So," Whitby said, "what's on our to-do list...?"

"Finish routing primary functions back to the mainframe." Mace cleared the last of the snarl from his throat, looked to Trey. "Can you do it?"

"I don't know."

"That's not the answer we need, Trey."

Barring spoke: "I can help."

"You can't even see," Mace said.

"Really, Mace? I hadn't noticed."

"Help how?" Capa asked.

"Base-level language. You get stuck, Trey, you read the code to me. Read it. We can work through it together. I need something to take my mind off how scared I am. We get in behind the higher-level programming. Come up through the subsystems. You should know this, Trey—"

"The system watching for attacks from the front, not from behind."

"Yes. Exactly."

Trey shrugged. For Barring's benefit, he added: "That sounds doable."

Mace nodded. "Okay. Helm, life support, and comms. In that order." He looked to Capa: "Can Pinbacker hack the payload from the control room?"

"No. The payload is on its own mainframe. Functions are currently routed to the flight deck."

"Can he otherwise damage the payload from inside?" Mace asked, tightly.

"No. Even if he had weeks, it would take more explosives, and far heavier equipment, than we have on board."

"Alright: third question." Mace folded his arms against his chest. "If we can't restore computer-assisted navigation, can we make the launch?"

"I'd be working from raw sensor data," Trey said. He turned to Capa and Cassie. "Once I fed you the coordinates, it would be up to you two."

"We could do it." Capa looked at Cassie. "We're quite capable of coordinating our efforts."

He touched her with the calm light of his eyes. He was no longer afraid. A blush edged up Cassie's cheeks; she smiled for him, just a trace. "Yes, we are."

"Fine." To her and Capa, Barring and Trey, Mace said: "Lock yourselves in."

"What about you?" Cassie asked.

"Obvious, isn't it—?" Whitby replied. She looked from Cassie to Mace. "We're going to find Pinbacker."

**#####**

He was heading back to check the security of the mainframe room and the engines. She was going forward to see whether Pinbacker had, in fact, left the payload. "The mainframe," Mace said, before he and Whitby split up. "Comms, helm, life support. Three primary functions."

"It's a level-three drill."

"He's testing us."

"Or is he—? What's he really up to?"

"If I find him, I'm not going to ask. Are you?"

"He wouldn't expect us to. Stay sharp, Stephen."

"You, too."

**#####**

The irony: here they were, playing barge-boat to a bomb whose blast could destroy a dozen Jupiters, and they hadn't a single traditional weapon on board. No firearms, not even stun guns. Normally, Whitby appreciated the wisdom of the mission psychologists in not adding lethal gadgets to an already potentially deadly mix of tension, irritability, and months of tedium, especially in a pressurized environment. She was, in any case, and despite her military background, no great fan of guns. Still, now, checking the ship's darker corners as she moved forward toward the payload, armed with a knife and a clumsy metal bar, chilled and wet and long overdue for food and sleep, she was sensing the limitations of her offensive capabilities.

The door to the payload control room was locked and undamaged. The public gangway stood open. She stepped inside. Nothing moved. The great gray silence of the solar bomb was as cool as the interior of a cloud. She turned to leave.

There was a bloody handprint on the inner side of the door frame. She paused, listening, then stepped through the gangway, back into the corridor of the ship. Ten meters ahead, she saw that the light for the lock of the door to the forward storage hold, which had been glowing green when she passed by a minute or so ago, was now red. She turned her knife in her hand so that the ball of her thumb was pressed to the butt of the steel handle. A close-combat grip, one suited to quick slashing.

She sensed rather than saw the movement behind her. So quick. Half a breath. A lacuna in her left-side peripheral.

A punch to her gut.

The pry bar slipped from the fingers of her left hand, fell with a heavy _clang_ to the deck.

Pinbacker's right hand was over hers. The blade of her knife was buried in her midriff.

He had his free arm, his left arm, around her. He was holding her close. Whitby felt more shock than pain, more betrayal than shock—

"You thought we might have had a future together, didn't you? I thought we might, too." His voice was a dry murmur. The strength left Whitby's legs. Her torso shifted in Pinbacker's arms as she slumped, and the twist of the blade brought tears to her eyes. "But not in this life, Loinnir."

He rested his cheek against her hair, whispered in her right ear: "I'm sorry."

She tried to formulate an attack. Mustered her energy. Boot heel to instep, back of skull to chin or jaw, left hand clawing at cheek or neck or ear. He held her, patiently. Waited for her to admit, silent but for her ragged breathing, what he must have known the second the steel pierced her skin: she was so very fucking tired, so very mortally hurt, and she hadn't the fortitude. When she dropped to her knees, he went to the floor with her, still holding her.

"Don't fight it, love," he said, gently.

Easy to obey. Easier than it had ever been. She was exhausted. She heard the blade of her knife ring like silver on the deck, and she was looking inward. Seeing him a year ago, maybe more. _Lieutenant Whitby, could you join me in the forward lounge, please—?_ The warmth in his eyes as he turned from the wall-wide window to look at her—

**#####**

Pinbacker waited until she went still. He took her back to the payload and cut the comm tags from around her neck. Then he returned to the forward hold. He still had much to do.

The crew was not the mission. The ship was not the mission. The payload was the mission. He had great faith in his people. As long as the payload was intact, they would find a way to succeed.

**#####**

As long as the payload was intact.

**#####**

**#####**

**#####**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N:** Well, this is it. The last this dirty rat— heh!— has to say on the subject of _Binary_. Brace yourselves: this is one big, brutal blowout of an ending. As always-always, thank you for stopping by. And, please, feel free to comment. I do appreciate it!

#####

#####

He found no sign of Pinbacker in the engine room, in engineering, in the aft storage hold. The door to the mainframe room was untouched, still locked. Mace pounded on the flight-deck door, stood flexing the fresh bruises from his hands after Capa let him in. He knew the answer before he asked; he asked anyway: "Has Whitby checked in?"

"No," Trey said.

"What's our status?"

"Helm is responding. Autopilot is available. Full navigational links between the helm and the mainframe are nearly restored. Life support corrected itself after the reboot—"

"We're still working on comms, Mace." Barring took over when the update reached her area of specialty. "We're close to rudimentary person-to-person within the ship. Beyond the bulkheads, it's still suit-to-suit only. No word from _Icarus_. Funny thing: I spent most of the voyage out wishing the creepy bitch would shut up, and now—"

Mace asked Capa: "Where are we with the payload?"

"Cassie put us on final approach five minutes ago—"

Mace hadn't even realized it. He frowned, tension and weariness snuffing out any hope he might have felt. "The repairs held—"

"Yes, they did."

"So—"

"We should be in position within an hour."

Years of training, of planning. Sixteen long months in space. It all came down to this: the gut-twisting sense that time was running out. Not only because of narrowly avoided hypothermia spiked liberally with adrenaline, no: Mace found himself shaking.

"Don't wait for me or Whitby." He had to tighten his jaw muscles to keep his voice steady. "If you're good to go, make the launch."

"Don't worry, Mace." Capa's brushy brows flicked together over his inhumanly clear eyes. He hesitated, then reached out and laid his right hand palm-down on Mace's shoulder. "You should eat something before you go."

Sometimes his flat affect could be chilling. Now, it seemed strangely reassuring. "I will later," Mace said.

He went to the door. "Capa—"

Capa, back at his station, the launch panel to his right, looked Mace's way.

"— good luck," Mace finished.

Capa met his eyes, nodded.

Mace left. The flight-deck door closed with a metallic _thunk_ behind him; the lock clicked. He headed forward.

#####

He found Whitby's knife, the matte-black blade sticky with blood, on the deck outside the forward hold. But no sign of Whitby herself. No sign of Pinbacker, either. The door to the hold was half-open. Mace listened, entered.

No motion, no sudden attack. He was alone.

Inside, he made a quick inventory. As one of the mission's mechanics and all-around go-to handypeople, he had a practical working knowledge of the mission's parts and supplies. He ignored the foodstuffs, the textiles, the bulk equipment and everyday tools. He noted almost immediately the slot meant to hold an EVA multi-tool, a combination drill and chemical torch more robust than the equipment built into the suits. On a sudden hunch, he went to check the rack that should have held the forward storage area's complement of explosive bolts, the charges that flanked the ship's emergency and airlock doors.

The rack was empty.

Mace guessed that if he were to trek aft and look, he'd find the bolt racks in the ship's other holds empty as well.

Pinbacker was building a bomb of his own.

The question became: where was he planning to detonate it?

If he meant to damage the ship's engines, he would have been working out of the aft hold; Mace, moving forward, earlier, through Engineering, would have seen him. If he meant to damage the ship itself catastrophically, he would need time and more than a handful of explosive bolts if he intended to hit anything other than secondary systems: the helm assembly, for instance, was more than a single man-hour away, even with a fast drill; and, again, Mace would have spotted him. As for the payload itself, Mace had to believe Capa when he said they didn't have enough explosive on board to shock the bomb from the inside. Pinbacker would know that, too.

He left the hold, looked back toward the ship proper, looked ahead toward the payload. The first of a pair of options presented itself when he saw something wet and glistening on the waffled decking ahead. Practically as black as engine grease in the gloom.

_Blood_.

He'd taken a handful of steps toward the payload when option two announced itself: a hissing from the staging area outside the forward airlock.

Mace turned toward the sound. The forward staging area held but two suit lockers. One was empty. The other was open. The hissing was coming from the air tanks on the remaining suit.

He moved automatically, quickly, back to the hold, took an EVA repair kit from the rack inside the door. He returned to the staging area, went to the second suit locker.

Something crunched beneath the sole of his right boot. Mace looked down and saw a pair of comm tags, crushed to pieces on the deck.

_Whitby_.

He thought, as his hands, working machine-like on their own, slapped the catalyst and binding halves of two squares of Handi-Patch onto the punctures in the suit's air tanks, _He wouldn't. Jesus God, even insane he wouldn't. He wouldn't throw her outside without a suit—_

The hissing stopped. Mace keyed in the diagnostic code for the suit. Tank one was empty. Tank two had lucked itself into a slower leak: it still held forty-eight minutes' worth of air. Mace took the remaining squares of Handi-Patch from the repair kit and stuffed them into the suit's leg pockets. In the hold, he found himself an EVA tool kit. To it, he added a grappling gun and four punch-through explosive-tipped grappling darts, each with a hundred-meter spool of thin, high-tensile cable.

He suited up and left the ship.

#####

_Icarus_ came back online as herself— after sharing close quarters with that vocal interface for more than a year, none of the crew could think of _her _as anything other than that— with a series of voice tests. _Monroe-Veidt Mark Six User Interface: Project Icarus,_ repeated again and again, a dozen times or more, a cascade of variations in speed and pitch, until she seemed satisfied that she was again herself; she expressed said anthropomorphized satisfaction by announcing, over the comm tags and the flight deck's wall speakers:

_Vocal interface with mainframe restored._

Capa stopped short of saying, "Welcome back." He said: "_Icarus, _not including Kaneda, Sullivan, or Searle, identify crewmembers presently on board."

_Barring. Capa. Cassidy. Trey._

"That's just the flight deck," Trey said. "_Icarus,_ locate Pinbacker and Whitby."

_Pinbacker and Whitby are not within current communications range, Trey._

Cassie looked over from the cockpit. "Maybe the interface between the mainframe and our internal sensors is still tweaky."

"No," Barring said. Her tone was decidedly more lifeless than _Icarus'_. "Whitby is dead. We all know that. Pinbacker killed her."

"Maybe. _Icarus _still would have picked up the readings from her tags. She could be in the payload." Capa said, before anyone else could point out who else had been overlooked in the census: "_Icarus_, get me through to Mace—"

_Mace is not within current communications range, Capa._

Cassie realized first: "He's outside."

From the upper deck, Trey wondered: "What the hell is he doing out there—?"

"The engines," Capa heard himself say. "The boosters on the payload—" Alarm seeped like fine cold dust into his bones. He knew— he'd known for most of his life— that he saw things too often on a quantum scale. In contrast, a captain's job was to see a mission from the smallest detail on out. Mace, by extension, as one of the ship's mechanics, had a comparable view of the mission as a whole. "Pinbacker wasn't planning on damaging the payload from inside. He's going to sabotage it from the outside _in_."

#####

In the silence of the bomb, Whitby woke up.

She'd been lying in a regular stew of unconsciousness: reams of shock, gouts of blood loss, ragged chunks of dying, maybe even a peppering of sleep. She hadn't slept in over a day; she hadn't eaten anything when they'd come in from repairing the hull. She'd taken but a sip of water in the aft staging area. She'd been half-frozen, then half-thawed, and she'd been stabbed. With her own fucking knife, yet, but that, for now, was beside the point. She was bleeding heavily, and, judging by the size of the pool of blood in which she lay, had been for twenty to thirty minutes. She was nauseous and near to catatonia, and her grip on consciousness was tenuous. She tried to stand, slipped in her own gore, and fell again. Knocked the wind from her lungs and almost passed out.

She lay curled on her right side and breathed as deeply as she could. Got as much air to her muscles and brain as possible, tried to ignore the burn-and-seep centered in her midriff. She propped herself on her elbows and began to drag herself toward the gangway.

#####

Mace was outside, tired and twitchy, trying to think as a mechanic as well as a captain and a madman.

He was facing the back of the solar shield, the payload, moving forward on thruster-power. He was getting nothing in the way of feedback from the flight deck, of course; _Icarus _was still hiding her scanner feeds and three-dimensional schematics deep in her rebooting guts. Within the limited visual field of his helmet slit, he swept his eyes over Capa's massive cube of a bomb and its sheltering parabola and thought of the mission's core planning, the specifics, the blueprints, the all-and-all that Pinbacker would know.

He looked, and he thought: _the boosters_. Four of them on the payload's near side, roughly twenty meters in diameter and thirty meters deep, each large enough to hold a good-sized two-story building. Armed with that EVA multi-tool, Pinbacker might access the fuel-line assembly within one of them. Or, in reality, several of them. But they were near to launch, and time was running down. If he could choose only one to sabotage, which one would it be—?

_Lower left,_ Mace told himself. _Engine One._ Each booster had its own supply of solid fuel; the lower-left booster was nearest the payload's shared store of catalytical gaseous fuel. If Pinbacker could damage the fuel lines, he might set the booster off out of sequence: the bomb would then careen away from the sun or skitter across the surface, breaking up as it went. Especially if the gas near in proximity to Engine One ignited unchecked and blew back through the inter-engine conduits, weakening the payload housing.

Mace angled his thrusters for Engine One. The opening of the booster cowl was a maw of palpable blackness. Hoping, if anything, to keep surprise on his side, he hadn't wanted to use his suit-light; he really didn't have a choice. He switched it on. The beam sliced ahead, far ahead.

And struck dim glare off the golden back of an EVA suit. Pinbacker was working at the access panel at the mouth of the engine's inner exhaust port, right where Mace had guessed he would be.

He had neither the time nor, at this point, the temperament for subtlety. Mace launched himself down the interior of the cowl.

When he was halfway into the booster, rationality kicked in, teamed itself with his powers of observation. The light from his suit was moving across the suited figure ahead of him. The figure itself was absolutely still. Moreover, it had no worklight of its own.

No time to stop. And instinct told him he shouldn't. Mace overshot the figure in the suit— it was Sullivan, he realized, dead, burned, and now posed as a decoy— and shouldered hard into the curve of the booster wall. He turned to see a second suited figure flying his way. Pinbacker collided with him, grabbed him by the arm and spun him around, and Mace felt a hard tug in the vicinity of his nape as the man threw his emergency helmet release.

A whistle of escaping air, a Vegas strip of warning lights bursting to life around his head. Mace held his helmet in place with one gloved hand, kicked away from Pinbacker, and did something that certainly wasn't in the user's manual for his EVA suit: he fired his boosters directly at the floor of the cowl. He shot upward like a missile. He hit the ceiling headfirst: the armor of his suit absorbed the impact; the lights winked out as his helmet re-sealed.

And for a second Pinbacker was off his guard. Mace went for him as Pinbacker did what the need to move without being seen had prevented him from doing minutes ago: he fired up the chemical torch on the heavy-duty multi-tool he'd taken from the forward hold and thrust the blue-hot tip toward the chest-plate ops panel on Mace's suit. Mace grabbed for the multi-tool; Pinbacker grabbed for his grabbing. As the torch beam etched a jagged molten line across the interior of the booster cowl, Mace freed his left hand, flipped the power switch for the mini-torch built into his EVA suit, and jammed the live tip against the torso of Pinbacker's suit.

They were drifting, the two of them, toward the cowl's outer edge. Pinbacker was insanely strong, inhumanly strong. The torch-tip of the multi-tool was angling Mace's way, toward the slit in his helmet. The cutting beam struck sparks off his armored left shoulder.

And suddenly Pinbacker stopped fighting.

Stopped moving entirely.

Mace could hear him breathing over the suit-to-suit feed. He took the multi-tool from Pinbacker's hand and switched off the torch on his own suit. There was a burn-marked hole where the torch-tip had touched Pinbacker's suit. A hole through the golden armor. Through Pinbacker's midriff. Through his spine.

Hardly a hiss of escaping air. The hole-edges had cauterized, front and back, suit to flesh, flesh to suit. He hadn't even felt it. And now, finally, the captain of the _Icarus_ was paralyzed.

Through the view slits of their helmets, Mace could see Pinbacker watching him. Those dark eyes. Calm, patient. Slightly mocking.

He asked only once: "Where is she, Captain?"

Pinbacker stayed silent. Nothing but his breathing, eerily steady and deep, over the feed. Mace braced his hand on the side of the cowl and pushed him away, past the outer lip, and turned back toward the interior of the booster. At a guess, he had less than twenty minutes to assess and undo Pinbacker's would-be sabotage.

#####

His guess, though he had no way of knowing, was a bit optimistic.

#####

"We're in position, Capa," Cassie said. "Coming up on optimal target range on solar surface."

Capa spot-verified his own numbers, checked them against Cassie's and Trey's. "Initiate preliminary launch sequence."

"Decreasing power to main engines. First-stage retros coming online." Cassie leaned left, out of the cockpit, and reached for a switch set apart from her daily piloting array. "Locking clamps disengaging: now."

#####

Whitby was nearly to the inner door of the gangway when a brief but thunderous metallic rumbling shook through the payload. Like the sound she might hear if God were to drop His keys.

_The locking clamps._

She pulled herself to her feet, reached for the door handle. Missed it by inches as, one or the other, her legs gave out or the payload tipped and she fell again. She hit her head on the way to the deck—

_— No. Fuck—_

— and the world around her went from gray to black.

#####

Pinbacker watched the edge of the shield approach. He was unable to move his hands to fire his suit-boosters.

Not that he really wanted to. He'd done enough. Maybe too much. He was moments away from the light, from release—

#####

The interior of the booster shuddered, airless and therefore soundless, like a giant mute bell. Mace saw the motion rather than felt it. He boosted himself back to the entrance, looked out. Saw the payload uncouple from the ship. Even if he had time to get back inside, to see whether Whitby was, in fact, aboard Capa's bomb, it would be too late. The public gangway was now an airlock.

He needed a second EVA suit. Sullivan's was cooked; the electronics were shot; he knew that. He looked for Pinbacker, spotted him, adrift, nearly at the edge of the solar shield. Mace loaded the first of the emergency darts, aimed the gun at Pinbacker's torso, fired. The shot went wide by yards. The dart flew out into the glare of the sun, popped and melted, the high-tensile line trailing out behind it like a strand of silver tinsel.

Mace swore. He was shaking. He took a deep breath, held it for a moment, relaxed, breathed out. He loaded the second dart, aimed, fired.

Impact. The dart struck the backplate of Pinbacker's suit, hooked, held. Mace retracted the cable, hauled him in. Again those dark eyes watched him. The bastard was still alive. Mace said, as he pressed Handi-Patch around the embedded dart, tethered Pinbacker to the lip of the booster housing, "Begging the Captain's pardon: sir, we'll be needing your suit."

_Whitby's dead, Mace. I killed her._

Mace started. Pinbacker's voice was an insidious hoarse whisper inside his helmet. He asked, again: "Where the hell is she?"

_Where haven't you looked, Mace—?_

Mace didn't reply. He turned away from Pinbacker, propelled himself back into the booster cowl. "Flight deck: respond."

Nothing. Suit-to-ship comms were still down.

At that moment, he knew, Capa was confirming the targeting coordinates and running final checks on the payload's systems. Trey was rechecking their retreat trajectory. Cassie was synchronizing the helm with navigational data from both Capa and Trey; in addition, she was verifying whether the shield would reconfigure as planned once the payload was away. Then she would fire the ship's main bank of retro engines, the boosters on the payload would fire, too, and Mace and Whitby, proceeding on the assumption that, dead or alive, she was in the payload, would be left behind.

Every instinct he had told him that what he was doing was wrong: he was flying into the housing of a solid-fuel rocket that was minutes away from firing with a degree of force that would make one of NASA's old Redstones or Atlases look like a firecracker by comparison. Worse, as far as his mammalian survival inclinations went, he was forcing himself to approach the rear of the booster slowly. Sullivan hadn't moved: Mace and Pinbacker hadn't collided with him during their fight; the freeing of the docking clamps hadn't jostled him away from the breached access panel. It was as if something were anchoring him in place.

Something was.

Sullivan was lying clamped to the cowl's interior, his right arm reaching clumsily into the access panel. Mace shone his worklight down the gold-scaled length of Sullivan's suit arm. Stopped at the glove.

Sullivan's index finger was threaded through a metal loop. The loop was attached to a wire. The wire, traced in the glare of Mace's light, was attached to the triggering pin of the first of the missing explosive bolts. The rest were clustered around it. Several of them were propping open a valve, less than a meter across, that served as an intermediary between the booster's solid propellant and the engine system's shared store of gaseous fuel.

From small things, terrible results. In 1986, some forty years before Mace was born, a single unsealed O-ring had led to the pre-orbit explosion of the space shuttle _Challenger_.

Mace cut the wire that had made Sullivan a booby-trap. He leaned into the access panel and, with drops of sweat floating before his eyes, removed the explosive bolts one by one. He shone the light around the access hole, one final check— the seals around the valve, the integrity of the fuel lines— thinking all the while_ Not yet, Capa. Not yet, not yet, not yet—  
_

#####

Forty-five seconds later, unincinerated, he was towing Pinbacker toward the entrance to the payload. The bomb and the ship were still moving in synch, but Cassie had decreased power to the main engines and fired the initial retros: when Mace reached the outer door of the gangway with his psychopathic cargo, the _Icarus_ was at least fifty meters away.

#####

She heard the grating from the heavy steel handle; the inner door of the gangway opened. Someone stepped, and something was dragged, past Whitby. She tried to push up as the footsteps doubled back and a human figure stood over her.

He'd come to finish her off. Decent of him. She said to the deck: "Make it quick, Dan."

"You sure about that? I was thinking if we ever got the chance, I was going to take my time."

Mace.

He bent down, got his arms under her, picked her up. Whitby stifled a gasp, put her own arms around his neck. Not, she told herself, out of sheer shameless relief, but to take the pressure off her bleeding midriff. Mace carried her into the gangway, propped her, standing, against the bulkhead. "Name's Stephen, by the way. Not Dan. Nice to meet you."

He had two suits waiting. Both of them looked like they had been put through an industrial trash compactor. "What's the fastest you've ever gotten into a suit?" he asked.

"Two minutes eighteen. When I wasn't dying."

"You're not dying. He stabbed you— when? Maybe twenty-five minutes ago." He spoke as he helped her into the less mangled of the suits. "Barring exertion, you've got a good ninety minutes before you bleed out."

"Barring exertion. I haven't been."

"You will be from now on. Relax, Loinnir. We're going home."

"It's started, hasn't it—?" She watched him position and clamp her chest plate. "There's no time. What the hell are you doing here, Mace—?"

Mace grunted as he hoisted the ridiculous bulk of her helmet. "Sounds like I'm listening to you bitch, woman."

#####

On the flight deck, from the cockpit, Cassie announced: "Payload navigational boosters online. Initiating final systems check. Standing by for shield reconfiguration."

She looked to Capa. He could feel Trey and Barring watching him from behind.

"_Icarus_," he said, "put me through to Mace."

_Mace is still beyond current communications range, Capa._

He was standing at the payload operations panel, his hand on the red firing key.

Cassie waited a moment, then prompted, quietly: "Robert—?"

The angle was optimal. They were greenlit across the board. No warning lights, either from the boosters or from the payload itself. So far, ostensibly, Mace had prevented Pinbacker from doing whatever it was their former captain had been planning to do.

And, in the end, it wasn't a vote. "It's my decision," Capa said. He turned the key. "Initiating launch sequence: now."

"Acknowledged." Cassie looked at him for a moment longer, her expression sad but proud. She turned back to her controls. "Main-bank retros firing in ten seconds. Strap yourselves in, everyone."

#####

Their suits on a two-meter tether hooked waist-to-waist, Mace and Whitby stepped out into space.

The near edge of the unreconfigured shield still fronting the _Icarus_ was now at least two hundred meters away. Mace linked arms with Whitby. "Boosters," he said.

She fired her suit boosters as he fired his.

And, to the sides, far above them and far below, the payload boosters fired, too.

Seconds later, her main bank of retros came online, and the _Icarus_, now towing the solar shield, started to back away. Very quickly. Too quickly.

Their suit boosters were no match for the ship's engines, Mace knew. He and Whitby were about to be caught out in the glare of the sun.

"Hold on," he said.

He loaded the emergency grappling gun with the third of the darts, aimed at the gap in the solar shield, fired. The dart hit the reinforced outer skin of the solar shield, deflected. A crescent of light lit a molten fingernail at the shield's upper edge, began to descend and broaden as, behind them, the payload started its descent into the sun.

A yellow warning light went off in Mace's helmet, to the left of his head. He hadn't had time to check their tanks before he and Whitby left the payload: he was running out of air. Five minutes' worth remaining. Ten, maybe, if the reserves hadn't been damaged.

He loaded and fired the fourth and last dart. It shot through the gap in the shield, its explosive tip striking distant sparks as it embedded itself in a support beam. Mace activated the cable retractor, grabbed the cable itself, started hauling himself and Whitby toward the gap.

Which was now closing.

The cable went taut in Mace's gloved hands as the ship's acceleration increased. He pulled faster. They were close enough to the shield to see the huge golden panels moving, sliding together, cascading in from above and the sides and below. The sunlight was descending like a curtain of fire.

There. Contact.

Mace shoved Whitby through the closing gap. The top edge scraped his helmet as he followed. He grabbed her as they cleared the shield's inner side, wedged both of them into the scaffolding, and hung on. The main bank of retros went to full power, and Mace's vision blurred as they started to pull gs.

#####

#####

Minutes later, inside the payload, Pinbacker, alone, finally not just dying but blessedly near to death, watched the stars fall from the ceiling as the reaction began.

#####

#####

Light burst past the edges of the shield, clear and clean and white. Mace could swear the roaring in his ears was the sun singing out, not the rush of his own blood. Eight minutes from now, on Earth they would know: Kirbuk's and Capa's theories had become reality; the _Icarus_ and her crew had succeeded.

#####

On the flight deck, in the chest of the mission's remaining physicist: a hollowness that might have been joy. Capa was unfamiliar with joy. He felt slightly dizzy; he felt empty. Like the entire purpose of his life had just burned away, in less than a second, seconds ago, in the explosion of the payload.

But: light. Everywhere: light.

For four minutes, they were on their initial retreat trajectory. Gravity spiked, pushing Capa's shoulder-belted torso into the chair at the science station, pressing the air from his lungs. Then Cassie put the ship on autopilot, got up, came over. She knelt by Capa where he sat, put her arms around him, held him. He held her, numbly, in return. He could feel it without being told; he knew; nonetheless, as a scientist he was compelled to seek empirical confirmation: he looked to the monitors at his station, read the raw data pouring in from the ship's sensors. Cassie and the others would see only numbers, symbols, and code. Capa saw what no human had ever seen before: a star healing itself, reviving.

He whispered to Cassie: "It worked."

#####

Inside Mace's helmet, a red light replaced the yellow one. He was out of air. So, by the sound of her agonized breathing over the feed, was Whitby.

The gravitational pull eased up as Cassie backed off on the retros, but Mace was already losing motor control. He was already edging toward unconsciousness.

The nearest airlock was at least seventy-five meters away. It could just as well have been a mile or more. His vision was starting to fail; even if he could force his muscles to move, he couldn't see to get himself and Whitby inside.

_Close. So fucking close—_

Mace tried to push clear of the scaffolding, couldn't. Blackness and pure animal panic pressed in behind his eyes. He could no longer hear Whitby breathing inside his helmet, and he was gasping for oxygen that was no longer there. With leaden effort, he got his right hand to the ops panel on his chest plate, felt blindly for a switch.

He lost consciousness without knowing whether he'd found it or not.

#####

On the flight deck, the ambient light dimmed, as the reaction within the sun stabilized, as _Icarus _automatically adjusted the glare shielding on the forward cockpit windows.

"Am I— umm—" Trey came down from the upper deck. Moving loris-slow, still blinking the glare from his eyes. As stunned as the rest of them. He nodded toward the windows. "Am I the only one seeing a suit beacon?"

Far out, hung up in the shadows in the scaffolding at the back of the shield, the firefly blinking of an LCD.

"Mace," Capa said, staring at it. "Whitby."

He unsealed the flight-deck door, made for the midships airlock at a run. Cassie went after him.

"Capa—" Just outside the staging area, she caught up to him, caught his arm. "I'll go."

"The mission still needs a pilot, Cass."

She frowned. "Meaning—?"

"I'm expendable now," he said.

"Not to me."

"You should stay on the flight deck until we're certain the ship is secure. Keep us on course."

"Robert—"

"I love you." He met her eyes, caressed her cheek. "I'll be right back."

"I know. I love you, too." Cassie bit her lower lip, looking away. "We're wasting time. Let me help you suit up."

#####

Priming spare air tanks, packing an emergency kit. Tethers, grapplers, Handi-Patch. Checking his suit, as he'd been trained to do. Capa left the airlock calmly and with purpose.

He propelled himself toward the light blinking on the back of the solar shield. Short, precise bursts on his suit thrusters, as Daniel Pinbacker had shown him.

He knew he was operating, now, on a local level rather than a systemic one, or a global one. He had to ask himself which, in the end, was more important. He was, after all, not made of numbers. He was not a series of equations. His crewmates were real. Real in ways his human senses could comprehend without calculation. Cassie's face. Her smile. The texture of her skin, the softness of her hair. Even Mace, for all the antagonism that existed between them, was real. Saving the world was, by comparison, an abstraction, a problem to be solved.

As he got nearer, he could see: two suited figures, neither of them moving, awaited him in the scaffolding at the back of the shield.

#####

A figure in an EVA suit was boosting itself toward them. An illusion. Mace's dying mind was replaying bits from memory, that was all. A thousand spacewalks. The fight with Pinbacker.

_Mace—?_

Capa's voice, muffled in the stale dead air of Mace's helmet.

"Capa—" The oxygen-starved capillaries were throbbing in Mace's brain. Something tickled the skin above his upper lip: his nose was bleeding. Nothing from Whitby. He couldn't hear anything from her. Not even her breathing over the feed. "Give her air— Give her—"

_I've got enough for both of you, Mace._

#####

Inside, Cassie and Barring removed Mace's helmet, and then they helped Capa and Trey pull Whitby from her suit. For Mace, the saving of the world was summarized thus:

"It worked, didn't it?" He was looking at Whitby's face. Her eyes were closed; her skin was chalk-white, bluish in the hollows; like Mace, she'd bled from the nose.

"It worked," Capa said.

"Pinbacker is dead."

Capa glanced at him, nodded. Then he and Trey and Cassie were moving Whitby to Medical, and Mace was alone with Barring.

He was too weak to unsuit on his own. He wanted to tell Barring that he would be content, as numb as he was, as tired and unfocused, to stay like this for a time, literally propped against the bulkhead, but she started unclamping him, unfastening and unscrewing, like he was a piece of old iron hardware consigned to a graving yard, and he had no choice but to let her.

"You can see now," he said, hoarsely, watching her.

"Well enough." She guided Mace to one of the staging area's benches and sat him down. She brought him water; she broke chunks off a protein bar and fed him. He was almost too tired to chew. "She's going to be fine," she said.

"You're a shitty liar, Ingrid."

"For once in my life, I'm sorry for that." She caressed his sweaty temple. "We just saved Earth. It's a time of miracles, Mace. Maybe there's room for one more."

"Sure."

#####

#####

Variations: on peace, on grief, on _sleep for a week_.

#####

#####

To compensate for the loss of their crewmates, they all assumed new responsibilities, learned new skills. Trey and Barring, for instance, mutually adopted life support and the Oxygen Garden. Capa, oblivious, as always, to anything resembling irony, found compatibility with the auto-doc, and began spending much of his non-science time in Medical. In addition to the "everything" he'd always done, Mace pieced together a replacement for the exterior comms tower they'd lost in the meteor collision. Within days, they were communicating with Lunar Control and with Earth.

Mace saw it in the faces, heard it in the voices, of those who appeared on the screens in the vid booth in Comms: not just amazement, not just a sort of shattering relief at what the _Icarus_ and her crew had accomplished, but incredulity, too; he confirmed to himself, with a sardonic and hidden inner smile, that none of them had been expected to survive.

They'd have months to chat with their families and friends, to provide interviews, to make guest appearances via video in classrooms and other venues. For now, they dealt with official business. Between calls from Project Icarus Control and his WorSpAd and Air Force superiors, Mace, like the others, met via videolink with the mission's counselors. Actually, there was only one shrink he'd talk to: Dan Monroe, gruff, broad-faced, built like a bear, who had the sense never to be patronizing. Low on the sensitivity-training scale, maybe, but he talked to Mace as if Mace were nothing more than an engine in need of tuning, and Mace appreciated that. They discussed those crewmates Mace had lost and now missed, Gavrila Kirbuk foremost among them. They discussed those he felt guilty for _not_ missing. All in all, he told Monroe, basically he believed that grief either killed you or it didn't. The truth, he knew, was more complex. Something more along the lines of _What doesn't kill me now weakens me so that something else can kill me later._ Monroe actually chortled when Mace said that.

"I'll let Friedrich Nietzsche know you're stealing his lines."

"You do that, Monroe."

Mace signed off, left the vid booth and Comms, and headed to Medical.

#####

"It's easier," Capa was saying, with android patience in his tone, "if you lie back. Stop squirming."

"I'll stop squirming when you stop washing your hands in icewater, you bastard," Whitby replied.

Mace entered Medical, leaned up against the bulkhead just inside the door, watched. Whitby was lying on the room's cot, her t-shirt pushed up from her midriff, while Capa examined her wound.

"It's looking good," he said. He glanced at the three-dimensional rendering that the auto-doc was projecting in midair to the side of the cot. "And no internal bleeding."

"Praise be, Doctor Freezemitts," Whitby muttered. But the smile she gave him was full of genuine affection and thanks. He'd saved her life, and she knew it. Well, Trey had saved it, too: when Capa discovered that the power fluxes within the ship had shorted one of the plasma freezers, Trey had given roughly half his blood during the emergency surgery to repair Whitby's abdominal aorta. He'd spent the next three shifts flat on his back, sipping fruit juice and looking like he'd been hit by a power loader. _Hell,_ Mace thought, but gratefully, _that's what you get for being O-negative, you dumb bastard._

He stayed quiet while Capa re-dressed Whitby's wound; when Capa stepped away from the cot and Whitby sat up, Mace straightened away from the bulkhead.

"I was wondering when you'd finally get off your lazy ass," he said to her. He glanced slyly toward Capa. "Cassie and Brainiac, here, are too polite to say anything, but you've been occupying prime real estate, woman. This is the last decent bed on board, and they're getting tired of screwing in the carrot patch."

On cue, Capa turned red and walked into a cartful of medical instruments. Whitby and Mace shared a smirk.

_Capa—?_

Barring's voice, audible from his comm tags._  
_

Capa cleared his throat. "Yes, Ingrid—?"

_There's a live feed coming through for you here in Comms. It's your sister._

Not the mission coordinators, seeking reports, depositions, explanations. Not the WorSpAd physics board. Not a dozen hounding universities or science journals. Capa smiled a calm and angelic smile. "Thank you, Ingrid. I'll be right there."

Mace tipped his head Whitby's way. "You done feeling her up, Capa?"

"For now," Capa replied. He winked at Whitby, and left her alone with Mace.

"Boy does nothing more than save the world, and it turns him into a right cheeky bastard." Whitby stood up, tugged the hem of her t-shirt back into place.

Neither she nor Mace mentioned how said boy had saved them, too. Though Mace came closer, the silence between him and Whitby grew awkward as well as mutual.

"Hell, Stephen—" she said, finally. She leaned up, tenderly kissed the corner of his mouth.

"I'm not very good at this, either," he said. He was practically shuffling his feet. Not quite meeting her eyes. "You know, umm— I'll understand if you need some time."

She frowned thoughtfully. "You mean if I'm not ready for—"

"Yeah."

"I think if we take it easy, I'll be fine. Robert's a damn fine hand with the stitcher."

Mace frowned back at her, confused. "What are you talking about?"

Whitby raised her eyebrows, nodded toward the cot.

Mace's frown inverted itself. He laughed incredulously. "You slut—!"

"I beg your _fucking_ pardon—" She glared in mock offense back at him. "Oh: you thought I thought you meant a couple of months of shell-shocked moping."

"Pretty much."

"Taking it slow. Long walks in the forward corridor, maybe. Holding hands by starlight in the Oxygen Garden."

"Exactly."

"A rest-cure for a broken heart."

She was smiling for him, but her sea-blue eyes were serious.

"Yeah," Mace said, softly.

"Y'know what that cure might include—?"

"What's that?"

Whitby embraced him, held him. Mace held her in return, and she felt good in his arms. She relaxed against him, laid her head on his shoulder; Mace rested his cheek on her hair.

"Hmm," he said.

"What?"

"I wonder how long Brainiac's phone call is gonna take—?"

Whitby chuckled, eased away from him just a bit, and hauled Mace down onto the cot.

#####

Voices, ahead, from Comms. Cassie was seated in the video booth with the door open. Capa, thinking that he'd misheard Barring and that Cassie had a call scheduled before his, was at first nonplussed, but he was willing to let her finish. She turned, though, as he approached, saw him, smiled. "Hey. Come on in."

He saw, then: Rosa was onscreen. "Robert," she said, "hello. It's about time I met your girl, don't you think—?"

Comforting normalcy. No mention of the enormity of what her younger brother and his crewmates had accomplished, or the trials they'd weathered. Capa's older sister was wise enough to leave the counseling to the mission's psych team. No stunned silence, no tears. Only her kind smile and her dark, sparkling eyes.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd had cause to grin. He grinned now, and maybe blushed a little, too. "Hi, Rosa." Cassie made room for him before the tryptich of video screens; Capa entered the booth and closed the door behind him.

**THE END**


End file.
